Stuff You Should Know - Fordlandia: Brazil Isn't Michigan

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

Henry Ford tried to build a Midwestern American town in the Amazon rainforest in the 1920s. It's true. And yes, Chuck will say this should be a movie. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and start your morning with me. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, so this is Stuff You Should Know, a wacky strange history edition. Get another one. I love this one.

We got a few people to thank out of the gate for this if I may. First of all, we want to thank listener Brennan Wilson who gave this idea to us through email. Okay. I had never heard of it before. So Brennan sent this in and I did a quick search as I always do when someone sends in something and thus it's like, oh, I do want to choose souls. But when it's something I hadn't heard of, I always look it up and I was like, oh, man, this is a really good one. It did know about this.

So big thanks to Brennan, big thanks to Livia, who put this one together and helped us out. And Livia actually said we should thank a couple of people in particular that sort of wrote the book, well, literally and figuratively, on Ford Landia. Greg Grandin wrote a book called Ford Landia, colon, the rise and fall of Henry Ford's forgotten jungle city, spoiler alert, and then there was a paper in the late 70s by a guy named John Galey in the Journal of Inter-American Studies in World Affairs. It also had a lot of good stuff. So thanks to everyone involved.

Here we go. Wow, that was a lot. I was waiting for you to tell us who Greg Grandin said we should thank. Yeah, right. Mom. So we are talking about Ford Landia. We are talking about what you could call Ford's Folly.

Just the kind of strip of bear right out of the gate. It was Henry Ford's misadventure down in the Amazon where he tried to build a model utopian society based on rural Midwestern America. Right in the Amazon. In the Amazon. That's a big catch right there because he didn't try to do it in Omaha or Topeka. He chose the Amazon over Topeka. And I think that says a lot about Topeka.

Yeah. Oh, we love our Candans. Oh, they know that. One all but one. That's right. All right. So we should talk a little bit about the sort of weirdo that was Henry Ford. Maybe we should do a hole when the hole up on him one day.

I didn't know a ton about the guy. It did a lot of great stuff. It was also not great in a lot of ways. That's what you're recurring theme. No. In 1903 is where the Ford Motor Company was born and Dearborn Michigan. And thanks to the Model T it changed America. It was a car that was available more available than any car had ever been to like regular Americans.

He paid his workers a living wage which at the time was $5 a day and he also had a lot of strings attached to that good wage and those good jobs Along the lines of like hey, I know we're a car company But let's have a sociology department in our company where we send out hundreds of investigators Around deer born into the homes of my employees To make sure that the kids are going to school and everything is tidy the wife isn't working and that people aren't drinking booze. Yeah, it was the Ford Motor Company equivalent of the Gestapo, the secret police, who they weren't coming to like your company owned house

that you lived in on the Ford Motor Company campus. This is your house in Michigan and these people felt totally fine coming by and checking on your family to make sure that you were living up to Henry Ford's personal standards of old-timey squeaky-clean Americanness. Yeah, but at the same time, he would also, like I said, pay them a good wage. He would give them great health care.

He would help citizenship along if he had immigrants working for them. He would help them with their applications, help them get home loans. So it was one of the things where he was like, I feel like I'm paying you well and I'm doing a lot of good for you and your family. And that gives me the right as really just your uber boss

to dictate how you should live your life as well. It's insane. It is. He had a, he was an anti-Semite. It's pretty well-trod that Hitler was at least impart inspired by the writings, the anti-Semite, anti-Semitic writings of Henry Ford. He was a huge fan of square dancing. You could call it an obsession, essentially. Very. Yeah. He was a huge fan of square dancing. You could call it an obsession, essentially.

Yeah, but it's very, very weird. He met his wife at a square dancing. Apparently, he thought that that was the end all be all of rural American life, that that was a perfect past time, a perfect symbol. Everybody should be into square dancing. I mean, nothing wrong with square dancing. I'm not knocking square dancing just to be clear. Oh, okay, good. I'm glad you said that because I was about to. He was also big time into soy.

Like he apparently some of the early model teas, their knobs and stuff were made out of basically a proto-soy plastic. He ate soy as much as he could. He seemed to have kind of fallen in the footsteps of the Kellogg brothers a little bit I get the past for sure he was that kind of old-timey Vegetarian kooky exactly But he also had some

Just his business acumen was just insane like he wasn't just a businessman He was an industrialist this guy was a titan of industry because he made the industry himself essentially. And what he was responsible for in part was the assembly line, but also, he might not have come up with the concept, but he really adopted something called vertical integration. Yeah, that's the idea.

Let's say you're building cars and you're like, oh, well, I wanna make my own tires instead of buying them from Firestone. So I'm going to start making my tires. And well, I want my own rubber then to make these tires. Like, why I pay somebody for rubber if I'm going to be making all these tires for myself and these cars. And so that's what inspired the idea of Ford Landy is.

Like, let's go where the rubber is and buy up land and start milking these rubber trees, you know, milk rubber trees, probably. You tap them. Tap them, that's right. And tap these rubber trees and then basically what you're trying to do is control, control the entire supply chain by owning it from the bottom up. Right. Which means buying coal mines to fuel the volcanization process of hardening rubber, buying up railroads to deliver the coal to the factories, like owning every aspect of what you need to produce your final product. That was what he was into, that vertical integration.

Like you said, I mean, that is why he ended up in Brazil. Yeah. Do you know what kind of Titan of industry you have to be for someone to come in and say, I tell you, what's killing us right now, these shipping costs on the railroads? He's like, well, let's buy the railroad then. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense and most people might even think about it, but you can't actually do it. Yeah, exactly. So this idea, though, of building, and as you'll see, it was much more than, let's go to the Amazon and buy some land and grow rubber.

It was for him, it seems like even more so, like, let's go down there and build this utopian society that I dream of, where people square dance, and no one drinks, and curses and stuff like that. But this wasn't a brand new thing for him. In 1921, he tried to do a similar thing in Northern Alabama near Muscle Shoals on a 75 mile stretch of land where there were some sort of abandoned facilities, or two nitrate facilities from World War I. And there was the construction, well well partial construction of the Wilson dam and he

said you know what let's move there let's restart those projects and get people work in and kind of found a new like society there basically where no one was living uh... he offered five million bucks to lease the dam I guess to the government and a lot of people in the damn i guess to the government and a lot of people in the government weren't down with it and eventually just kind of fell apart well supposedly it was just one senator from alabama who really posed it yeah and he was on the top of the enough that yeah that's a tradition apparently uh... this senator got death threats from people in alabama not just in

the muscle shows area but like all over alab Alabama, they had mobilized to start feeding this million person in workforce that Henry Ford was going to employ. They changed everything they were doing and started to ramp up production and anticipation of this and this one senator got in the way and said, nope, this guy's getting too sweet a deal and he killed it.

And he killed it enough that Henry Ford was like, fine, I'll just go somewhere else. And the guy started getting too sweet a deal and he killed it and he killed it enough that Henry Ford was like final Just go somewhere else and the guy started getting death threats So apparently he made a visit to muscle shoals and had to have our embody guards with him because he was in that much in danger That many people were that mad at him. Holy cow All right, so we've covered Ford. He was a strange man. He was an anti-Semite He's a titan of industry was an anti-Semite. He was a Titan of Industry. And now we got to cover the rubber part of this.

Not where the rubber meets the road, but where the rubber meets the podcast. Oh man. That was the saddest little gruntty grown I've ever heard out of you. There was an involuntary, I'm sorry. I know. I could tell you. You couldn't even help it. Oh boy, like there's no way that you're gonna die before me, but if you happen to, I feel like I would just,

and I know that you're not gonna have an open casket funeral either, but let's say you did. Okay. I feel like I would go and lean over your body and just tell you how great it was working with you all those years and you would make that same sound. Why are you saying I'm not going to have an open casket funeral? Do you know something I don't? No, I thought you were going to either be shot out of a cannon or cremated and scattered or sky burial or something? I know, that's so old. No, I don't know what I'm going to do yet, but I could have an open casket.

I can be cremated after everybody's like, hey, good job, Josh. See you later. Good to meet you. I don't know who you are, but wait a go. That's what I expect people to say. I hope that happens what today. So the world is being industrialized in the early 20th century and the 19th century. Rubber became a very big deal. Rubber is a product of South America originally. And the Amazon region had a lot of rubber trees down there. So they were like the dominant player. And rubber trees down there grew just sort of where they wanted to grow. It wasn't like a plantation crop or something like that.

But it really grew. And so along the Amazon, they were building little cities and stuff to support that industry for many many years Yeah, they put a lot of effort into Like supporting this rubber trade and Brazil was like the Basically the only player on the market. That's where the rubber trees were and if you wanted rubber It's where you had to go because we didn't have synthetic rubber yet. Yeah, so Somebody some Brit I don't remember we've talked about it before. Yeah.

Don't remember what episode. Maybe we did one on rubber. I'm not sure. Uh-oh. But a Brit said, hey, you know, Sri Lanka has a very similar climate to the Amazon. Maybe those rubber trees will grow there. And not only did the rubber trees grow there, the rubber trees had no natural pests or... Anemies?

Sure, we'll just say... Predators, parasites. Yeah, all of those things. It had none of them, I should say. So those things flourish like crazy in Sri Lanka and other parts of, I guess, central Southeast Asia. That's right. Not central Asia.

Yeah, and that really put a dent in the rubber economy in Brazil, kind of collapsed it basically. And following that in 1922, the Stephenson plan in Britain said, basically said, hey, if you're a French planter or a British planter in one of our Asian colonies, you can restrict the supply of rubber. You can create a false market basically to raise

the rubber prices all around the world. And so all of a sudden, America was going, we're being squeezed here by the Stevenson plan. So at the time, Secretary of Commerce, Hoover, Hobel-Toeville steps up and says, all right, we gotta to get some rubber going on our own now and develop our supply chain. So go do it.

In 1924, he sent a technical mission down to Brazil to look again once again in the Amazon and see if they can bring the Amazon back and make it a player again. And that's what they tried to do. It was basically like which companies would go there and which companies would go elsewhere. I think Good Year ended up going somewhere else, Firestone ended up going somewhere else. They went to Liberia.

Good Year went to the Philippines in Sumatra. But Ford was still like, I wanna make my own tires. I don't wanna buy from those guys. So there's like, I want to make my own tires. I don't want to buy from those guys. So there's like, why don't we do it? Yeah, he also, so I get the impression after researching this, that getting rubber to make his own tires was almost a pretext for him. That's what he needed to tell people. That's what he needed to spend Ford Motor Company money on.

But what he really wanted to do was to basically tame the Amazon. Just to making scare quotes all over the place. You're civilized, the people of the Amazon. Yeah. Basically turn them into rural Midwestern Americans with square dancing on their mind all the time. Right? I know. So that's really what he wanted to do. He didn't even care if he made money. He didn't care if he lost tons of money.

He wanted to make this utopian society. And the Amazon was his greatest place as any, because it was such a challenge. And also if you went to Sumatra, or he went to the Philippines, like these, it was a different place. Like there were also other colonial powers there. The Amazon was right, because everybody went somewhere else, and Ford said also other colonial powers there. The Amazon was right because

everybody went somewhere else and Ford said, I'm going there. Yeah. They said, we would like you to come here because Henry Ford was, like he said, he was a business magnet. He was a worldwide, well-known name, basically a celebrity all around the world. In Brazil, they're like, listen, we need someone like Henry Ford here to kind of put us back on the map rubberwise. And so they basically said, hey, listen, we'll give you land if you come over here and start your rubber business here. And that's what they did in 1927. They got the Ford Motor Company, got a gift of two and a half million acres uh... alongside the uh... tapahos river

and he said here's the deal uh... made deal with the government there uh... after twelve years like it give yourself a dozen years to get going and then you can start paying Brazil seven percent and then two percent to the local governments and now why they kept it at 9%. You know, it was 10% and Ford talked them down like a percentage point or something.

Yeah, probably. They got some kickbacks about 125 grand and kickbacks to make it happen between people who sort of negotiated the deal, which really made Ford mad because as a guy who loves Square dancing doesn't like kickbacks, you know what I'm saying? No, and 125 grand and kickbacks in 1927 is 2.17 million dollars today. A lot of money. Yeah. 1.709 million pounds and 1.971 million euros. Yeah, which he might have thought that's very thorough.

Well, you called me out for not having the Euro conversion before. So I would make sure I was prepared today. Yeah, he might have been a little wrinkle because he might have thought he could have paid less for two and a half million acres there. I don't know. I think it was probably not a part of it. Yeah, you're probably. You hit it on the head. He was a square dancer. That's right. So, but that was just par for the course apparently.

I think it's changed dramatically since then. Yeah. But what you're saying about his, like his desire was par for the course apparently. I think it's changed dramatically since then. Yeah. But what you were saying about his desire was more to make that thing. There's a quote where he said his desire was not to make money, but to develop that wonderful and fertile land. Yes. The very quote I was searching for while I was making that point, but couldn't talk. Okay.

So thank you. Yeah, that's what he wanted to do. But as far as Ford Motor Company's concerned, like they're going down there to start up a rubber plantation, make their own rubber to make their own tires, part of the vertical integration plan. And so there were not, not everybody was on board with this. Yeah. Because anybody who knew anything about the rubber market said, hey, that Steven Simplan that the Brits enacted in 1922, they shot themselves in the foot.

They kept from exporting rubber to try to artificially influence prices, but the Dutch didn't go along with it and they undercut the Brits and now the Dutch control most of the American market and they're selling at perfectly reasonable prices. We don't actually need to set up our own rubber plantations. And they said, Ford said, no, we're going down to the Amazon and he made it happen. He did. August 1928, he

started shipping stuff down to Brazil. The problem initially, in boy, there were a lot of problems, but let's call this problem number one. They chose a site high up in elevation because they didn't want to be involved in flooding, which sort of makes sense. Sure. But it was so far inland that these steamer ships pulling these barges, taking all these supplies to literally build a city, essentially. They couldn't get down these shallow rivers. So it took forever. It took like over, like, not over a year, but

you know, nine to ten months for the supplies to finally get there. So the timeline from the beginning was just super slow. Yes. They finally did get there in early 1929 and the steamer captain who was the captain of the steamer ship that pulled the barge of supplies down there initially was a Danish man named Einard Oxholm. And he is a really great example of Ford and Ford Motor Company's idea that if you are competent at one thing, you can be competent at anything. I saw it described as basically a corporate wide, arrogant optimism.

That you could just get in there and get things done if you were a smart person and you applied scientific principles, you could do anything. So he appointed Einer at Oxhill as the manager of this plantation and settlement. This is the seems ship captain. Is now running the entire show down there now. Yeah, he had no experience at all in anything like this, but like you said, Ford thought,

he's a good guy. I like the cut of his jib. Have you seen him? Have you seen him square dance? Right, exactly. Let's get this guy some cloggy shoes or what, I don't even know what those are called. We got to do one in square dancing. Yeah, they're called clogs, I think.

Okay, and they're going to be so mad at us. With the square dancers? Yeah. I don't know, man. Maybe we'll mad at us. With the squared answers? Yeah. I don't know, man, maybe we'll find out it's actually super interesting and cool. No, no, no, we'll do a podcast on it, but I'm just saying we're gonna get emails,

but the anger's email you're gonna get from a squared answer is maybe how dare you. Right. And that's where it's capped. Yeah. Yeah. In all caps. So Oxome hired a bunch of locals obviously.

They cleared out the jungle. They started setting up their buildings. The initial name of the community was Boavista. As you can tell by the name of the title, it was eventually renamed Ford Landia. This would be a great movie. I don't know why this hasn't been a movie yet. It's surprising.

I'd say that a lot, but I think in this case it would be pretty good. It'd be in like the spirit of road to Wellville. Yeah, yeah, totally. Okay. So they're down there working these locals literally to death at times. Disease was killing a lot of them. A lot of these, and as we'll see, there are a lot of these workers would revolt, given the working conditions for numerous reasons that we'll hit on. But there were a number of riots over the period of time that they tried to get Ford Landia

up and off the ground. And, you know, things were going very slow. So Ford was like, you know what, we're tearing down this forest. Why don't we at least sell this wood and we can make a little scratch, but no one wanted it, so there was no market for the woods. So that was another thing that kind of went down the tubes. What else? Oh, everything else, basically.

They, they, I don't understand why. If you believe in applying scientific principles and all that to get something done, they didn't hire an agronomist. Agronomist? Agronomist, maybe. I don't know. I think I finally had a plan. They didn't hire anybody who had any experience with plants.

They hired Ford Motor Company executives who had been working in Dearborn, Michigan to go down and make this thing happen. Like again, arrogant optimism that these guys could do this, even though they knew nothing about plants and rubber plants, and that would just immediately start to come back and bite them. Yeah, they did things like, oh, I don't know, plant trees at the wrong time, plant trees in the wrong places. Nothing they did seem to work as far as the botany angle goes and the biology angle goes. The trees, like I said earlier, the rubber trees are naturally growth through the Amazon,

but he was like, he wanted to set up like the plantation style thing where he just had these huge plots of rubber trees as a monoculture, which they successfully did in Asia where they didn't have those enemies like you were talking about those pests. So it flourished there, but in South America, as Livia puts it, it was like an all-you-can-eat buffet for these pests. That was bad enough. Then at one point they said, oh, here's what we'll do. Well, let's introduce these ants, these salva ants, because they eat the caterpillars that

are killing our rubber trees. So they introduce all these ants, and the ants are like, you know what tastes better than caterpillar? Rubber trees. So they literally introduced a new pest on top of all that. Exactly. They just like wave at like the caterpillar as they walk past while they were both eating the rubber tree. And they said, you know what tastes better than rubber trees?

Clogging shoes. You know what tastes better than clogging shoes? Salva ants. Wait, clogging shoes? Salva ants. Wait, clogging is different in squared dancing. Someone's gonna call us out on that. That's fine, it doesn't matter. The point is that salva ants are one of the few species of insects that are prepared and served as food

because they're tasting, not for the protein kind of, because they're taste. See, I get your joke now. Yeah, I thought you were just being cheeky. No, no, it's true. They, I thought you were just being cheeky. No, no, it's true. They, I was, but it was also true. Yeah, cheeky with a point, which is sort of your motto. Yeah, that's an album name right there.

Right. So the squeeze album, I think. They, that's a great, great one. The, oh yeah, Salva Ants, tasting. They taste like ginger, lemongrass, and the part of them. And you can serve them on raw pineapple and they taste amazing.

Apparently it really pops. I have to try one of those. I don't know if any of the executives or workers in Fort La India knew this. I'm guessing the workers probably did. And I wonder how many ants were eaten. Right. Just because they were so tasty,

but in a way, it didn't work to get rid of the caterpillars. And that's just one of just so many examples of them just trying something that seems like it would work, but only ending up demonstrating their complete and total ignorance of this. Yeah, exactly. So things are going well. In September of 29, Ford sit down a trouble shooter to get a report and like, what's going on down there really. And he came back and said, there's a, quote, complete lack of organization. The minister of agriculture in Brazil thinks Henry Ford is crazy. And

a quote at present, it's like dropping money into a sewer, the end. So, things are not going well, Chuck. Do you want to take a break and come back and talk about how things continued not go well? Yeah. Okay. So, um, things are not going very well for the Ford Motor Company down in Brazil, but, just like with his workers in Michigan, Ford did fulfill his promises to the workers in the Amazon in Brazil That he would take care of them in exchange for them trying to act like rural Midwesterners pretend like square dancing So they built hospitals they built a really great cutting-edge hospital right there in the middle of the Amazon They erected a water tower which was the highest, the tallest structure in the Amazon for quite a while.

They installed swimming pools and golf courses. There were generators that produce electricity, there saw mills, like they created the city. And they also added prefab houses for the workers to live in. The thing is, all this stuff was delivered to them, was given to the workers in exchange for their labor But also they were paid something like 35 cents a day Which is better than the slave labor they were engaged in before

But the thing is I think the Ford Motor executives Were just expected the the Brazilians to say oh Thank you for for giving us running water even we'll do anything you want And they found over time as we'll see time time again that now the people of the Amazon have a tremendous amount of pride and they're not willing to just kind of roll over for somebody like Henry Ford or his Incompodent boobs from Dearborn. Yeah, but it was also it it's also, we should point out that it wasn't, it was segregated still. Right.

Like the via Americana, which was the, the neighborhood with the swimming pool and the golf course and the tennis courts and all that stuff. That was for the US staff and their families. They did have running water. The Brazilian workers, I think they could use the pool and stuff like that, but they had their accommodations weren't as good. They had well water. They had to live in these.

This was, again, just thinking you can just transplant a Midwestern American city and drop it in Brazil. It doesn't work because they had their homes traditionally built off the ground with thatch roofs to keep it cool. Henry Ford built iron-roofed square duplexes that were steaming hot, said here, eat this food that we eat, eat this whole wheat bread and eat this canned fruit. And they were getting stomach aches and they were getting sick because you can't just go in and radically change a culture's diet overnight either.

The microbiome does not like that. No. So they had squared answers though. They really did. They did have squared answers. Like not only that, they also had readings of Walt Whitman and other American poets

that were pre-industrial translated into Portuguese. They said, no, no, you can't drink. Just like our workers in Dearborn, they said, no, no, we're not going to listen to you. So that one didn't stick. But apparently there was square dancing, like you said. The problems though were not so much like the house is being too hot or the square dancing being just non-never ending. It was things like really instituting American ideas like eight-hour, probably 10 or

12-hour workday among the workers. And that's not how they worked before. They would take time off during the hottest part of the day, traditionally, when it was the rainy season, they would work less, and as a drier season, they would work more. This is not what Ford expected them to do. So there were cultural clashes, like right out of the gate,

and rather than even ask what the problem was with the Brazilians, the people of the Amazon, the Ford Motor executives just expected them to fall into line into acquiescent, just do what Ford was telling them to do. Yeah, and then just little things like the many of the Brazilians would sleep in hammocks every night, and all of a sudden they were in beds, which isn't the same. You would think, oh, you get a bed instead of a hammock, but

if you're not used to it, that's like throwing us in a hammock, although some people say great in hammocks. I don't think it's a good hammock. But they, I think it was an interview in 1994 in the South Florida Sun Sentinel with a doctor from that hospital, Dr. Emmerich. Oh, boy. I'm so glad you tried it. I'm gonna say, Zalaggy. Okay. She's, when a word, when a name starts with SZ here in trouble,

right out of the gate. For sure. But there was a, you know, a 1994 interview with him. He ran the hospital for like three years and he was like, listen, we would put them in these hospital beds. They're used to hammocks and we would come back and they had like cut the mattresses open

and dug holes in the center, so they could have that sort of hammocky curve in their beds. They'd like to midwives to deliver their babies, and he even admitted we withheld food from these pregnant women until they agreed to go to a hospital and have a nurse do it. Right, so in Ford's mind, we're giving you guys cutting edge hospital equipment in medical care,

but you have to accept it exactly the way that we're presenting it. And not just the medical care, but everything, just the very existence as a worker in Ford Landia, you had to accept it as it was being presented. There was no adapting to local traditions, local climate, local, anything. So that, anytime somebody is taking something from somewhere else and is rigidly refusing to adapt it to this new environment, that thing is going to fail. I can't think of a single project new environment, that thing is going to fail. I can't think of a single project that has succeeded in that respect. Maybe when we start living in space,

like on the moon or something like that, that would qualify, maybe the ISS qualifies. In that sense, it's submarine that people live on, that would qualify to. There's all sorts of ones that actually qualify. But in this case, I'm planning it Earth. Okay. In this case, it did not work because they were too rigid and they would not adapt to local

conditions. Yeah. It was a man crazed with an idea and that's never, that never leads to success. It seems like because they're usually, like you said, rigid and nonconforming and that's just no way to run an operation. Right. Exactly. So speaking of not running an operation, Oxholm left in 1930 he was the original ship captain and then manager of the whole thing. He told the Detroit news it was the hardest proposition I have retacled in my life. A couple of other guys cycled through pretty quickly in that position. And things started getting more and more heated and these sort of, you know, talked about

the riots to broke out. They became more frequent and more serious. Yeah, one of the problems was these, the executives didn't even speak Portuguese. They would just sit there and like boss around the Brazilian workers in English. Yeah. And expect them to do what they were saying and expect them to understand what they were saying. One of the things that really, there's a couple of chapters of Ford Landy and the thing that ended the first chapter was strangely a transition from table service, cafeteria seating, right, where you just

sit at a table and somebody would come over and bring you food to a cafeteria line type of food service, right? It's like a stand in the hot sun for your food. Exactly. And they did not like that. They ended up getting very hot and getting very angry and very hungry. Hangry, you could even say, hot and angry in the Amazon is not a good combination. So tensions were already high among the workers just from having to do this now.

And apparently a man named Manuel, Caitano de Jesus, who was a brick mason at Ford Landia, said something to Caj Austin Felt, who was the Fordason at Ford Landia, said something to Kaj Austin felt who was the Ford supervisor at Ford Landia about the new cafeteria plan, and Austin felt just basically laughed in DeHasers' face. And not only did that upset DeHasers, it upset it upset as co-workers who were around two, and in very short order they started rioting. Yeah, they were like, guess what? We have machetes.

They wrecked the cafeteria, they wrecked the generators, they wrecked a lot of the equipment and the buildings, the residential buildings. And this is the best part and I love that Livia dug this out. They sort of like an office space with that copier. They put a real herding on those time clocks. Yeah. That they were punching every day. And they ended up actually occupying Ford Landia for three days because apparently the Ford executives had fast boats hidden along the river for just such an emergency and they

fled. So the workers took over Ford Landia and occupied it. And the Ford Motor Company's executives were friends with Juan Tripe, who was the president of Pan Am, who said, sure, we'll let you charter a few of our jets and get some of the Brazilian military in there to suppress this rebellion. And they did after three days, the workers gave up peacefully and left. They left because they were fired. Apparently Ford paid them up to December 22nd, which was the beginning of the riding day, and they were fired

on Christmas Day, I believe. And that was the end of the first chapter. Ford Landia just kind of fell into disuse momentarily, but in very short order, Ford sent another guy, and this guy was the best manager Ford Landia ever saw His name was Archibald Johnston. He was a Scotsman. Yeah. Yeah, he came in He said we need roads. We need paved roads. We need to connect all this stuff The we he built more houses. He built a movie theater. He built that dance hall because he had to have the square dancing Basically just kind of improvement on mass to everything. The hospitals, the schools, the living conditions and everything.

He said, hey, worker, set up a garden, but you should also still adopt this diet and grow the things that Henry Ford says you should eat and grow. Right. But the thing about Johnson, the workers called him the white tiger because he got there and he was like, okay, I can make this work. And he did. He adapted to the local situation.

He was willing to understand where the Brazilians were coming from, where the workers were coming from. He was less rigid as far as rural, Midwestern expectations were concerned. And he was as success as a result. And I think he showed up in 1931, I believe, as when he took over. And he was there for several years. And under his overseer ship, his oversight,

his watch, finally, finally, Ford hires a plant person. Not even a, not even like a botanist, it was a plant pathologist who is good with figuring out what things that are plaguing plants, but they're not necessarily good at getting plantations going. But they hired at least somebody who knew what they were talking about with plants named James Weir. Yeah. They hired someone who knew plant.

That was his basic as a guy. James Weir, like he said, and this was because they had the city going and they were building this town, but there was also the rubber operation that we kind of forget about at times in this crazy story. But they were like, maybe we should actually start, you know, getting the rubber growing. So he, we were came in and he tried some new methods, didn't work out too well and he said, you know what we need to do really?

This is garbage area now because of everything that we've done to it. What we really need is to start over an area close by. So in 1934, Henry Ford managed to work out a land swap of a part of about 80 miles downstream where they built a new plantation called Beltera, and this actually produced some rubber. They brought in some of those successful trees from Asia, and they grew, I believe, they capped out at about 2500 employees compared to Ford Landia's four or 500. So things were going better, but they still,

I think at their max in 1942, they produced 750 tons of latex, which sounds like a lot, but apparently that was just like a drop in the bucket of what Ford needed for their tires. So even though it was more successful, it still didn't satisfy what they wanted or what they needed from the beginning. And to kind of add insult to injury to all the people who donated blood, sweat, and tears, and sometimes their lives to getting Ford's rubber produced, Ford gave up on the idea of making it his own tires. The same year they started getting rubber from the rubber trees down in Brazil. That's right. So, um, Ford, he, his, I don't have the impression that he ever made it down there. Oh, like in person?

Yeah. I don't believe he ever did. Um, but he, he kind of ended up getting a little distracted from his company. He set up a museum of like a rural, like an ode to rural pre-industrial American life that you can still go to today. It's called Greenfield. It's in Dearborn. He just got, he got less interested in the company. And so his son became president, I think all the way back in 1919, Edsel Ford interested in the company and so his son became president i think all the way back in nineteen nineteen edgel ford but the Henry Ford his son was just a figurehead apparently at one executive

board meeting as a forward said that he was in favor of adding hydraulic breaks to the cars and Henry Ford jumped to his feet and said edgel you shut up in the state in the corner board meeting, he's the president of Ford. So he had to put up with a lot. But he was like, we need to sell this as early as 1935. He was looking for buyers.

The problem is, is everybody knew the kind of problems Ford was having down in Brazil. And no one wanted it. No one wanted it. Yeah, I don't blame him. 1943 is when Edsel died. There was a bit of a power struggle, but eventually Henry Ford the second who was Henry's grandson came on board in 1945 as president and kind of started claiming House and the company and any operation in the company that wasn't doing well went

away and this and Ford Landy was kind of the tops on the list basically. And they managed to sell it back to the Brazilian government after all those years. At a loss with all the land and all the improvements. Brazilian government should sure why not we'll take it back. Exactly. The Brazilian started into a cattle ranch versus a bit ironic because Henry Ford was famous for hating cows. I don't know if we touched upon that at the very outset when we were talking about how weird he is, but he hated cows. He didn't like horses either, but he really hated cows. And that makes Edgelford's death even more ironic too, because Edgelford got ulcers and his father insisted that he drink some unpasturized milk from one of Henry Ford's

farms and the bugs in the milk killed Edzel in 1943. Yeah, his own father and bossing him around making him drink unpasturized milk from a cow that he didn't even like killed his son. That's how Edzel went. But he hated cows before that, right? Yes, he grew up on a farm. So as much as he idealized rural life, he couldn't stand farm animals. You know what I love? Squared dancing. Exactly.

You know what I hate? Cowls. Yeah. They ate the hay that he used to square dance on. So he didn't like them. I'm looking into picture of Henry Ford now, and I'm trying to think of who would play him. Sam Rockwell.

Sam Rockwell. Oh, play everybody. Hey, Rockwell. Sam Rockwell. Oh, play everybody. Hey, that wouldn't be too bad. You'd have to age him up a little bit, but that's not a bad idea, actually. You know what movie I keep going back to that I just, I can watch it almost any time

I get the notion. I am the pretty thing that lives in the house. That Osgood Perkins movie. I didn't see that. I have definitely told you about it multiple times. Do you need to put it toward the top of your list? Well, you told me about the devil's, his other movie. What was it about the girls and the black coat's daughter? Yeah, black coat's daughter. You still haven't seen that either? No, no, no, I saw it and I didn't like it. You were mad at me because of that for like

a year. You were. You were with the good thing about me is I forget very quickly. So I'm not mad at you anymore. No, this is much, much different than the black coat starter. Much different. I'm not going to check that out. Yeah, it's, it's a cozy, cozy haunted house story. The same rock well in it. No, I was just thinking about that movie.

Gary Olman could play him too. He does that... Age-Dup thing. Camelian thing pretty well. What about Harrison Ford? They have to age him down. But... Love Harrison Ford.

Don't like the aging. I thought they did a good job from the trailers. Did you see Oppenheimer? Yeah. No, I haven't yet. Gary Olman pops up in that. Yeah, I heard a lot of people do. Have you seen Barbie going tonight? It's great. Capital G.

You're not telling me anything else about it, but I heard it already hit a billion dollars. Well, it's capital G great and it's about Barbie. Okay, don't tell me anything else though, please. You know who plays Barbie? Shh. Yes. You know what I mean? You know, right? Yeah, of course. Why are you telling me more stuff about Barbie though when I've very clearly asked you not to? I just wondered if like saying things like

it's about Barbie was too much. Yes, it is. That's what I'm saying. I like to go in totally fresh. Like, so it's just stanza. It's called Barbie, but it's about Henry Ford. Awesome. And you knew who plays Henry Ford?

Sam Rockwell, Margot Roby. Oh, very nice. It's quite a transfer mechanism. Yeah, that was all very unexpected. All right, well let's wind this up. So, uh, rubber synthetic rubber comes along. Everything changes. The rubber tree is not as useful as it was before.

Because from hero to zero. That's right pretty quickly. And Ford Landia though, parts of Ford Landia are still there. It is now what's known as sort of, well, I won't see a band in city because there were a few hundred people that lived there for a few decades. But in 2016, there was a writer for the Guardian who went down there to report. And they're now like several thousand people who have now moved in to Ford, Landia and live there working with Gypsum, right? Yeah, there's really high quality Gypsum deposits

discovered shortly after Ford left. And so these people like support the miners or mine themselves. So, yeah, if you like to the people of America who know this story, it's like, oh, Ford, Landia and Belterra, these abandoned failed cities that Ford tried. If you ask people in Brazil, it's like, no, Belterra and Ford Landia are cities in Paris, they in Brazil. Like, they've been inhabited this entire time

and they still are. So they were abandoned by Ford, but not Brazil. Yeah, but and you can look up pictures today for landia, there are still warehouses that water tower, I think it's still standing, right? Yes. I think it might still be operating. Oh wow.

Yeah, but it is definitely interesting to see sort of the remnants of this place that it's this has got to be a movie one day I'm telling you just put Margot Robbie in it and your golden. Okay. You got anything else? I Don't think I have anything else sir. I don't either Chuck. Well since Chuck mentioned Margot Robbie again, he unlocked listener mail Well, since Chuck mentioned Margot Roby, again, he unlocked Listener Mail. That's right, but instead of Listener Mail, we would love to talk very briefly about our kid's book that is now available for purchase, yeah? Yeah, let's do that. Yeah, so what we did with McMillan Publishing is, is we took our book for adults, not like it was

triple X or anything, and we, we kiddified it, you know, we we took our book for adults, not like it was Triple X or anything. And we kiddified it. We took out some of the stuff, some of the chapters that shouldn't be there. We added some stuff. We rewrote some things to make it a little more kid friendly. And what we ended up was what I think is a great kid's book. A dynamo book for young readers. That's right. It's available now. Get one for your kids. It looks great Everyone in Milan was so wonderful to work with. Yeah, for sure and

It makes a great Christmas gift or birthday gift the stocking stuffer and it's called stuff kids should know by You and I and our buddy Nils Parker who helped us write this thing. Yes So where can you get a chuck? You can get it everywhere. You know our advice is always to seek out a local bookseller and who helped us write this thing. Yes. So where can you get a chuck? You can get it everywhere. You know, our advice is always to seek out a local bookseller and support your local bookstores and get one there. They're all over the place at regular bookstores,

kids bookstores, but throw a rock and you're gonna hit one of these books probably. Yeah, but if you hit it with a rock, you have to buy it. Yeah, it's still policy. Well, that was a very good idea, Chuck. So everybody, I hope if you go out and get our book, you enjoy it thoroughly. And you can let us know what you think about it via email. You can send those emails to stuffpodcast.com.

And Iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is ICT. Over the years, I've compiled thousands of inspiring and thought-provoking quotes. And now I'm passing that knowledge on to you and my newoking quotes. And now I'm passing that knowledge onto you in my new daily podcast, Icedees Daily Game. In less than five minutes,

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