July 21, 2010 • 23 mins
Anxious to control his own rubber company, Henry Ford built a utopian community in the midst of the Amazon. In this episode, Katie and Sarah explore the construction of Fordlandia, the life of its inhabitants and what eventually went wrong.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and our topic
today is fort Landia, which is Henry Ford's failed attempt
(00:21):
at this utopian company town in the middle of the Amazon.
And the idea sounds good enough. They're gonna be neet
suburban homes and swimming pools and doctors and wholesome Detroit
style food. I don't know about that. Well, let's just
roll with me here for a minute. Time clocks that
sort of thing. There will not be malaria, knife fights,
(00:41):
wasted money, or caterpillars, clearly. But guess what, it does
not work out at all. And this was a suggestion
that Candice had given us a few months back after
press coverage for Greg Grandon's book fort Landia, The Rise
and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Uncle City came out
(01:01):
and there's a lot of good information we were able
to pull from reviews and such, but we still haven't
gotten our hands on a copy to read the entire thing.
Actually put my name on the waiting list at the library,
so fingers crossed. But the book did really well. So
I'm hoping that the next step for this for Landia
Reliving will be in musical. And if someone listens to
(01:25):
this podcast and then goes and write some musical, I
want to get some tickets to that, please. And Sarah
has a pitch for an opening chorus, so if you're
good and listen to the whole podcast, she just might
sing it at the end. We'll see how it goes.
But first we're going to give you a little bit
of background on the man behind Fordlandia, Henry Ford, and
(01:45):
by the nineteen twenties, Henry Ford had been in the
motor car business for decades. He's established his moving assembly line,
He's rolled out the Model T and even the Model
a UM. He's revolutionized the industrial working world with his
labor theories, the five dollar work day at the forty
hour work week, profit sharing, and he's also dabbled in
the idea of model communities, which it's probably a natural
(02:08):
extension for someone who's so interested in model factories, definitely,
According to an article by Wayne Curtis, so far this
dabbling and model communities has gone pretty well. He's set
up a small logging village in northern Michigan, and that's
worked out fine. He's stopped them with everything a working
man could want, you know, their w rec centers, schools
(02:28):
for the kids, churches. But by the late nineteen twenties,
for It is still feeling a little discouraged. Despite all
these accomplishments. World War One has sort of shaken him
up a little bit and people aren't so crazy about
all his anti Semitic views. And you imagine, and he's
an older guy now too, He's in his sixties, and
he's starting to look back to his own rustic, sort
(02:52):
of rural past and feel a little nostalgia for it.
So when he has a business opportunity to ablish his
own rubber production company in Brazil, he jumps at the chance.
He has this challenge now of creating a model community
around this and think of how impressive that would be,
taming the Amazon into this series of paved suburban streets.
(03:16):
I'm speaking as Henry Ford here, not as myself, and
creating a society that's connected to global industry, but still
small and quaint enough to grow its own vegetables, raise
its own animals too, to be its own little place. Homi. Yes,
a US diplomat actually calls it like it is, and
he says Mr Ford considers the project a work of civilization.
(03:39):
So it's not just a business prospect. It's really this
whole utopian idea. But we have to wonder first why rubber,
why the Amazon, And to understand that, we need to
go back a little bit into the nineteenth century and
talk about some rubber barons. So rubber trees are native
to the Amazon, and when rubber became global commodity in
(04:01):
the nineteenth century, some people became very, very rich. But
then Englishman Henry Wickham smuggled out sacks of seeds, and
eventually people discovered that rubber actually grew a lot better
in Southeast Asia, where none of its natural predators lived.
And because there aren't natural predators, you can establish huge
plantations full of rubber trees that produce a consistent product,
(04:25):
unlike South American rubber, which was still collected from wild trees.
So the rubber barons of South America are just out
of luck. Yeah. Also, according to Robert Santos, is the
economic history of the Amazon. British and American companies were
already sort of looking to get rubber production out of Brazil,
partly because anti slavery campaigners were not a fan of
(04:46):
South American labor conditions. But decades later, Ford is concerned
about this Asian corner that's developed on the rubber market,
and he has to have rubber for his car tires.
He can't really afford to mess around have this one
major source of rubber somehow be cut off to him.
And he's also, yeah, he doesn't want to ship it
(05:07):
from halfway around the world. Yeah, if, if, if it
can be grown in South America, he would rather import
it from South America than Asia. And so he gets
the idea that if he established his own rubber plantation
in South America, he wouldn't have to worry about any
of the outside factors. He would own it, he could
control the costs, and he could ensure that the industry
(05:29):
wouldn't be monopolized. And that brings me to your my
favorite line and the stairs outline. But he'll do it
his way, the forward way, which makes us both saying board.
And he's not the first guy to have thought of
American controlled rubber production. Back in nine three, the US
government had started looking into the rubber resources of South
(05:51):
and Central America. A University of Michigan botanist Carl LaRue
flags a spot in Brazil near way the Tapajos River
feeds into the Amazon. By nine, Ford has chosen this
spot as his own and has arranged a deal with
the Brazilian government two point five million acres of land,
plus police protection and duty free imports of supplies in
(06:13):
exchange for nine percent of the plantations profits after twelve
years and in n the supplies from Dearborn start heading south.
So the plan is in action. And four months later
we have a steamer and a barge arrived with this
pile driver, steam, shovel, tractors, locomotive, prefab buildings, parts for
(06:34):
a saw mill, basically everything that you would need to
set up a suburban company to creative machine, except that
it's in the Amazon. And it's basically a company on
a boat company a industrial do Brazil, which is going
to be Ford Motor Companies Rubber Harvesting Division. And that's
(06:54):
how a spot named Boa Vista becomes Fordlandia. The intention
or the plan is to employ people, house a hundred
thousand and exports six million tons of rubber a year.
So let's see how it goes. So it doesn't take
that long to actually set up the town. The town
(07:14):
is going to be run by managers imported from Michigan,
and Native workers will be the ones who are collecting
the rubber and doing other tasks that are related to
to running the whole the whole city, the whole model city,
and the native workers are pretty interested by this job
because Ford pays wages that are double to what they're
(07:37):
used to receiving. Plus you get housing and medical care
and food, so it sounds nice enough. And you know,
the houses look very cute, situated on neat little streets
with lawns that got power lines run by a diesel generator.
The workers have access to well water from spicketts, while
the white collar and US workers have running water inside
(08:00):
several schools. They're swimming pools these Michigan made fire hydrants.
And the Villa Brasilia part of town has Taylor's shops, restaurants, shoemakers,
a butcher, a baker, not sure about the candlestickmaker, but
they're all subsidized, and working mothers have a nursery or
a baby clinic. And again as far as health goes,
(08:22):
if you die, you get a paid funeral with a
US made coffin. I'm kind of imagining that on their
promotional brochures like and if you die baby clinics often. Um,
but there are issues, and the main issue is just
ignoring the customs of the people, ignoring the climate, ignoring
how work is done in the Amazon, ignorance in general. Yeah,
(08:44):
it reminded me of when we talked about the Jamestown
settlers who are trying to live in North America like
it's old England and making fatal mistakes. So we have
fatal mistakes made here too, and we're going to start
with housing. So the traditional form of housing in this
area is uh sued well suited to the heat and
(09:05):
the humidity of the Amazon. You have cool dirt floors
and thatch roofs. But the new style in Fordlandia is
cute little Swiss cottages cape cod style model homes, all
with asbestos insulated metal roofs. So you can see where
this is gonna go. With a an insulated metal roof
under the Amazon sun. One employee calls them galvanized iron
(09:29):
bake ovens, and a Harper's reporter said that Mr. Ford
and Brazil are somewhat in disagreement in matters of doors, screening,
and heights of ceiling, so the houses are not too
Most of the people's suiting. The indoor bathrooms gross out
the workers. They don't like having that all in the house.
So this is an immediate problem for making for landia work.
(09:52):
And the rubber harvesting doesn't go well either. Again, the
traditional way workers lived um kind of spaced out and
they harvest their latex and get paid by the pounds,
so for what they actually accomplished. The Ford Way workers
lived in suburbia. They go to work every day and
this requires them to keep track of their hours, so
(10:14):
how long they've been there as opposed to what they
actually produce. And there's this Flintstone's style whistle that's mounted
on top of the water tower that can be heard
at seven miles away, and it signals meals the start
and the end of every work day. And it gets
even worse than that because these old time management systems
don't mesh. Well. Yeah, the old way is to use
(10:38):
the sun and the seasons as your clock and calendar.
So when you're harvesting rubber, obviously you work at the
coolest parts of the day, so you work at dawn,
you work at dusk. You don't work from six to three,
which is going to be the Ford schedule. And the
new ways also, uh we have the whistle we just mentioned,
but also punch clocks like like it's great like and barrel. Yes,
(11:01):
I know that from experience. So you'd have to swing
by the main building on your way to the fields,
even if it meant a detour, just to punch in
this clock. And to make things even more ridiculous, we're
running on Detroit time because this is Ford and we
have to the boss is is different too, so our
(11:23):
plantation managers of old may have paid terrible wages and
worked you entirely too hard, but it was the sort
of paternal system where your boss might also stand as
its godfather to your children. And the new way is
very hands off. Ford never visits for Landia, let alone
the entire country of Brazil, which must have been demoralizing
(11:45):
to people who weren't used to that kind of management.
Well and even people even the Michigan managers. That would
be I think demoralizing if you had moved your whole
family all the way down to for Landia and you
your never set split in the country definitely isolating. So
additional thing. It sounds kind of minor, but just think
(12:08):
about if if this were your life and you were
in the Amazon all the time. Entertainment the old way
would be native dances, native songs, that kind of thing.
The new way, this is my favorite part. We have singalongs,
poetry reading, mandatory square dancing, which sounds like nightmare. And
(12:28):
just just as a note, I mean, this is the
nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, so square dancing isn't really
the North American norm. I know, it sounds like a
long time ago. But Ford likes this old fashioned style
of dancing. He likes polkas that sort of thing, not
in doing the Charleston. Yeah, and he's not into the
(12:49):
sexier dances that are sweeping the nation. And again Charles
Morrow Wilson writes and Harper's the Natives did not choose
to square dance on the village Green, or to sing
the quaint folks of Merry, England, or to treasure long fellow. Yeah.
You can imagine if you've just worked at six to
three shift, maybe the last thing you would want to
do is listen to some long fellow on the village green,
(13:11):
and I think you would have to force the people
to square dance because they don't know why you would
want to otherwise. Another entertainment issue. Remember that these are
model communities, so there will be no drinking, and no
one really pays attention to that one. The native workers
immediately buy their stuff from river boats that come up
(13:32):
on pay day, and according to Grandon, the white linen
suit guys who are trusted to go gather seeds from
the jungle would actually binge on alcohol and get so
wasted that they would start baptizing farm animals with perfume.
Or maybe they just had too much fun square dancing.
I don't know. But the most problematic is with food.
(13:55):
The old way, of course, was eating traditional foods with
traditional service, and and Forward's vision everyone eats in a
mess hall that's incredibly hot inside and only serves Detroit
food wheat bread, oatmeal, and canned Michigan peaches, which is
as Georgians come on and Michigan peaches um. The visiting
(14:18):
writer Charles Morrow Wilson again writes a workman's mess hall
was set up, but native workers did not like the
wholesome Detroit style cooking. And complained bitterly of indigestion. North
American Fair in the jungle no more pleases the customers
than a quick change to Amazon Fair would please you
or me. So the major problem, though, with the whole
food scene is when they cut weight or service to
(14:41):
save money and make the whole dining hall cafeteria style
and a buffet. Yeah, and so the workers, for one thing,
aren't used to cafeteria style food. Um, they're not used
to waiting in line. Again, you're working in the sun
all day and then you have to stand in line
for your lunch. And the result of this change is
(15:01):
a riot. We have one worker saying I'm a worker,
not a waiter, and workers ransacked the dining hall. They
drive trucks into the river. They smash windows and wreck
the sawmill and the radio station and the time clock.
Of course, some yeah and American managers are panicking. They
some seat cover in the jungle, or some go out
(15:22):
onto a boat that's tied up and just waited out.
But it's a bad sign. If the change to cafeteria
style dining sets off a riot, I think you have
a major problem. Our most damning issue, however, is the
rubber itself. So our old way of growing rubber and
harvesting rubber was to gather it from wild trees that
(15:45):
grew spaced out in clumps, and the space provided some
protection from pasts, while these clumps provide protection from heat.
Ford's vision is to plant one point four million trees
in neat rows, because that's how factory supervisors like things.
The problem is that when you do that, it attracts
(16:05):
leaf blight, fungi, and pests like caterpillars less leaving the
trees completely exposed to the elements. So the rubber production,
which is the whole mission of this is completely ridiculous.
It does not work at all, and even if they've
been smarter about cultivating the rubber, the terrain of ford
(16:26):
Land is terrible, as is the climate. The soil erodes.
It's incredibly hot and humid, which is too much for
our Michigan managers. When it rains, the water collects in
low spots, which leads to epidemics of malaria. And when
it doesn't rain, we have a dry season from July
to November where the waters of the river drop up
(16:47):
to forty feet and the boats can't come in, and
it's not just the mosquitoes. We've also got ants and
moths plaguing our people, and we have violence too, so
this isn't just a bad camp scenario. We have things
like knife fights going on, especially in the early days,
but also later with a cafeteria riot and a protest
over the employment of workers from Barbados who the native
(17:11):
workers were upset that these imported workers were getting higher wages.
So Ford finally realizes that he picked the wrong spot.
He admits defeat. Yeah, this whole thing. He kind of
doesn't admit defeat though, because in nineteen thirty four he
trades part of his original concession for seven hundred three thousand,
(17:31):
seven hundred fifty acres to the north and sets up
yet another model town, which is going to be an
improved version of Fordlandia called bell Terra. I hope there's
not quite so much square dancing, so there are some improvements,
like a manager who makes square dancing optional and some
lessons learned. Ford is willing to erect a Catholic church immediately,
(17:54):
which is something he was opposed to doing in Fordlandia.
And we've got doctors who are working to eradicate malaria
with quinine, but This is still no dream city, and
certainly not for Ford. When our Amazon workers unionize in
nineteen thirty nine, seriously, I mean I was kind of
blown away by that fact, unionizing the Amazon workers in
(18:15):
nineteen thirty nine. But unlike for Landia, we actually do
get some crops out of Belterra. Amazing They're pretty pitiful, though.
In nineteen forty two there's a crop yield of seven
hundred and fifty tons of latex, which are from Asian
tree graphs, which are less susceptible to all these pests.
And Ford had hoped though, for thirty eight thousand tons annually,
(18:39):
so clearly we're falling far short of that goal. Harvests
of other crops like eucalyptus, teak and balsa are also
small due to strict regulations of timber exports, and some
are used to trim Ford Lincoln's. So that's a little momentum,
I guess from bel Terra for anyone who has one
of those, But they they have a few other random
(19:01):
things to cinnamon, ginger, coffee, tea. Still nothing much comes
from it. Belterra is not a particularly productive town and
the war World War two is really hard on the
city because German subs actually stop supply ships from reaching
the city. So you can imagine suddenly you're relying on
(19:22):
your little gardens, and it would be tough times without
your Michigan tin peaches. It's finally all over by nineteen
In December of that year, officials at the Ford Motor
Company announced, our war experience has taught us that synthetic
rubber is superior to natural rubber for certain of our products,
(19:44):
and they would return the concession to Brazil for two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars and that's it. So it
makes us wonder how much did this whole thing cost.
It hask to have been a fortune, and it it was.
Ford Motor Company says that it cost about twenty million
in but then a few years later documents came out
that showed it was more like twenty five million. Some
(20:06):
historians put it as much as thirty million, so clearly
a huge waste of money. So it may have been
a waste of money, but at least we've got some
cool ghost towns out of it. They're still there today.
It'll take you about eighteen hours on a riverboat to
get there, but you can look up some pictures and
Google images. They're pretty spooky. And I think there's spent
(20:28):
some talk about reviving Belterra, but not so much for
land is a lost cause still apparently no. I know.
I promised that Sarah might sing a song at the
end of this podcast, but she's actually losing her voice.
So instead we're going to recite what we think would
make a lovely introduction to the Ford Landy of musical
(20:50):
that you're going to write for us. We'll try to
be emphatic about it. There are you ready? I'm ready?
Okay for Landia, Fordlandia, each your oats and don't die
in the malaria. And that is our final word on Fordlandia.
And that brings us to listener mail. Our email today
(21:12):
is from listener Marcella, who wrote about our Madhari podcast,
and she said, my great grand uncle was a reasonably
famous Guatemalan writer at the turn of the twentieth century.
His name was Enrique Gomez Carrio and he was the
Guatemalan consul in Paris from onwards. He was a notorious womanizer,
and family legend has it that one of his various
(21:34):
lovers was Matahari herself. He wrote a book about her,
and while whether he was involved with Matahari or not
is on the level of speculation, he was accused of
being responsible for bringing her to the French authorities and
deceiving her into returning to Paris, where the French detained her,
and in fact, the book he wrote about her was
supposed to be Enrique's attempt to disassociate himself with the
(21:57):
whole case. Enrique's last wife was also somewhat well known,
Consuelos Succin to Santa Supuri, later life of Antoine de
Santi Superi, who of course is the author of The
Little Prince. So thanks for writing to us, Marcella. I
think she also mentioned he's buried in Paras, which is
where Oscar Wilde of course ended up. And if you
(22:19):
have any cool family stories to send us where at
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(22:40):
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Blog on the how stuff Works dot Com homepage. In
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and our topic
today is fort Landia, which is Henry Ford's failed attempt
(00:21):
at this utopian company town in the middle of the Amazon.
And the idea sounds good enough. They're gonna be neet
suburban homes and swimming pools and doctors and wholesome Detroit
style food. I don't know about that. Well, let's just
roll with me here for a minute. Time clocks that
sort of thing. There will not be malaria, knife fights,
(00:41):
wasted money, or caterpillars, clearly. But guess what, it does
not work out at all. And this was a suggestion
that Candice had given us a few months back after
press coverage for Greg Grandon's book fort Landia, The Rise
and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Uncle City came out
(01:01):
and there's a lot of good information we were able
to pull from reviews and such, but we still haven't
gotten our hands on a copy to read the entire thing.
Actually put my name on the waiting list at the library,
so fingers crossed. But the book did really well. So
I'm hoping that the next step for this for Landia
Reliving will be in musical. And if someone listens to
(01:25):
this podcast and then goes and write some musical, I
want to get some tickets to that, please. And Sarah
has a pitch for an opening chorus, so if you're
good and listen to the whole podcast, she just might
sing it at the end. We'll see how it goes.
But first we're going to give you a little bit
of background on the man behind Fordlandia, Henry Ford, and
(01:45):
by the nineteen twenties, Henry Ford had been in the
motor car business for decades. He's established his moving assembly line,
He's rolled out the Model T and even the Model
a UM. He's revolutionized the industrial working world with his
labor theories, the five dollar work day at the forty
hour work week, profit sharing, and he's also dabbled in
the idea of model communities, which it's probably a natural
(02:08):
extension for someone who's so interested in model factories, definitely,
According to an article by Wayne Curtis, so far this
dabbling and model communities has gone pretty well. He's set
up a small logging village in northern Michigan, and that's
worked out fine. He's stopped them with everything a working
man could want, you know, their w rec centers, schools
(02:28):
for the kids, churches. But by the late nineteen twenties,
for It is still feeling a little discouraged. Despite all
these accomplishments. World War One has sort of shaken him
up a little bit and people aren't so crazy about
all his anti Semitic views. And you imagine, and he's
an older guy now too, He's in his sixties, and
he's starting to look back to his own rustic, sort
(02:52):
of rural past and feel a little nostalgia for it.
So when he has a business opportunity to ablish his
own rubber production company in Brazil, he jumps at the chance.
He has this challenge now of creating a model community
around this and think of how impressive that would be,
taming the Amazon into this series of paved suburban streets.
(03:16):
I'm speaking as Henry Ford here, not as myself, and
creating a society that's connected to global industry, but still
small and quaint enough to grow its own vegetables, raise
its own animals too, to be its own little place. Homi. Yes,
a US diplomat actually calls it like it is, and
he says Mr Ford considers the project a work of civilization.
(03:39):
So it's not just a business prospect. It's really this
whole utopian idea. But we have to wonder first why rubber,
why the Amazon, And to understand that, we need to
go back a little bit into the nineteenth century and
talk about some rubber barons. So rubber trees are native
to the Amazon, and when rubber became global commodity in
(04:01):
the nineteenth century, some people became very, very rich. But
then Englishman Henry Wickham smuggled out sacks of seeds, and
eventually people discovered that rubber actually grew a lot better
in Southeast Asia, where none of its natural predators lived.
And because there aren't natural predators, you can establish huge
plantations full of rubber trees that produce a consistent product,
(04:25):
unlike South American rubber, which was still collected from wild trees.
So the rubber barons of South America are just out
of luck. Yeah. Also, according to Robert Santos, is the
economic history of the Amazon. British and American companies were
already sort of looking to get rubber production out of Brazil,
partly because anti slavery campaigners were not a fan of
(04:46):
South American labor conditions. But decades later, Ford is concerned
about this Asian corner that's developed on the rubber market,
and he has to have rubber for his car tires.
He can't really afford to mess around have this one
major source of rubber somehow be cut off to him.
And he's also, yeah, he doesn't want to ship it
(05:07):
from halfway around the world. Yeah, if, if, if it
can be grown in South America, he would rather import
it from South America than Asia. And so he gets
the idea that if he established his own rubber plantation
in South America, he wouldn't have to worry about any
of the outside factors. He would own it, he could
control the costs, and he could ensure that the industry
(05:29):
wouldn't be monopolized. And that brings me to your my
favorite line and the stairs outline. But he'll do it
his way, the forward way, which makes us both saying board.
And he's not the first guy to have thought of
American controlled rubber production. Back in nine three, the US
government had started looking into the rubber resources of South
(05:51):
and Central America. A University of Michigan botanist Carl LaRue
flags a spot in Brazil near way the Tapajos River
feeds into the Amazon. By nine, Ford has chosen this
spot as his own and has arranged a deal with
the Brazilian government two point five million acres of land,
plus police protection and duty free imports of supplies in
(06:13):
exchange for nine percent of the plantations profits after twelve
years and in n the supplies from Dearborn start heading south.
So the plan is in action. And four months later
we have a steamer and a barge arrived with this
pile driver, steam, shovel, tractors, locomotive, prefab buildings, parts for
(06:34):
a saw mill, basically everything that you would need to
set up a suburban company to creative machine, except that
it's in the Amazon. And it's basically a company on
a boat company a industrial do Brazil, which is going
to be Ford Motor Companies Rubber Harvesting Division. And that's
(06:54):
how a spot named Boa Vista becomes Fordlandia. The intention
or the plan is to employ people, house a hundred
thousand and exports six million tons of rubber a year.
So let's see how it goes. So it doesn't take
that long to actually set up the town. The town
(07:14):
is going to be run by managers imported from Michigan,
and Native workers will be the ones who are collecting
the rubber and doing other tasks that are related to
to running the whole the whole city, the whole model city,
and the native workers are pretty interested by this job
because Ford pays wages that are double to what they're
(07:37):
used to receiving. Plus you get housing and medical care
and food, so it sounds nice enough. And you know,
the houses look very cute, situated on neat little streets
with lawns that got power lines run by a diesel generator.
The workers have access to well water from spicketts, while
the white collar and US workers have running water inside
(08:00):
several schools. They're swimming pools these Michigan made fire hydrants.
And the Villa Brasilia part of town has Taylor's shops, restaurants, shoemakers,
a butcher, a baker, not sure about the candlestickmaker, but
they're all subsidized, and working mothers have a nursery or
a baby clinic. And again as far as health goes,
(08:22):
if you die, you get a paid funeral with a
US made coffin. I'm kind of imagining that on their
promotional brochures like and if you die baby clinics often. Um,
but there are issues, and the main issue is just
ignoring the customs of the people, ignoring the climate, ignoring
how work is done in the Amazon, ignorance in general. Yeah,
(08:44):
it reminded me of when we talked about the Jamestown
settlers who are trying to live in North America like
it's old England and making fatal mistakes. So we have
fatal mistakes made here too, and we're going to start
with housing. So the traditional form of housing in this
area is uh sued well suited to the heat and
(09:05):
the humidity of the Amazon. You have cool dirt floors
and thatch roofs. But the new style in Fordlandia is
cute little Swiss cottages cape cod style model homes, all
with asbestos insulated metal roofs. So you can see where
this is gonna go. With a an insulated metal roof
under the Amazon sun. One employee calls them galvanized iron
(09:29):
bake ovens, and a Harper's reporter said that Mr. Ford
and Brazil are somewhat in disagreement in matters of doors, screening,
and heights of ceiling, so the houses are not too
Most of the people's suiting. The indoor bathrooms gross out
the workers. They don't like having that all in the house.
So this is an immediate problem for making for landia work.
(09:52):
And the rubber harvesting doesn't go well either. Again, the
traditional way workers lived um kind of spaced out and
they harvest their latex and get paid by the pounds,
so for what they actually accomplished. The Ford Way workers
lived in suburbia. They go to work every day and
this requires them to keep track of their hours, so
(10:14):
how long they've been there as opposed to what they
actually produce. And there's this Flintstone's style whistle that's mounted
on top of the water tower that can be heard
at seven miles away, and it signals meals the start
and the end of every work day. And it gets
even worse than that because these old time management systems
don't mesh. Well. Yeah, the old way is to use
(10:38):
the sun and the seasons as your clock and calendar.
So when you're harvesting rubber, obviously you work at the
coolest parts of the day, so you work at dawn,
you work at dusk. You don't work from six to three,
which is going to be the Ford schedule. And the
new ways also, uh we have the whistle we just mentioned,
but also punch clocks like like it's great like and barrel. Yes,
(11:01):
I know that from experience. So you'd have to swing
by the main building on your way to the fields,
even if it meant a detour, just to punch in
this clock. And to make things even more ridiculous, we're
running on Detroit time because this is Ford and we
have to the boss is is different too, so our
(11:23):
plantation managers of old may have paid terrible wages and
worked you entirely too hard, but it was the sort
of paternal system where your boss might also stand as
its godfather to your children. And the new way is
very hands off. Ford never visits for Landia, let alone
the entire country of Brazil, which must have been demoralizing
(11:45):
to people who weren't used to that kind of management.
Well and even people even the Michigan managers. That would
be I think demoralizing if you had moved your whole
family all the way down to for Landia and you
your never set split in the country definitely isolating. So
additional thing. It sounds kind of minor, but just think
(12:08):
about if if this were your life and you were
in the Amazon all the time. Entertainment the old way
would be native dances, native songs, that kind of thing.
The new way, this is my favorite part. We have singalongs,
poetry reading, mandatory square dancing, which sounds like nightmare. And
(12:28):
just just as a note, I mean, this is the
nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, so square dancing isn't really
the North American norm. I know, it sounds like a
long time ago. But Ford likes this old fashioned style
of dancing. He likes polkas that sort of thing, not
in doing the Charleston. Yeah, and he's not into the
(12:49):
sexier dances that are sweeping the nation. And again Charles
Morrow Wilson writes and Harper's the Natives did not choose
to square dance on the village Green, or to sing
the quaint folks of Merry, England, or to treasure long fellow. Yeah.
You can imagine if you've just worked at six to
three shift, maybe the last thing you would want to
do is listen to some long fellow on the village green,
(13:11):
and I think you would have to force the people
to square dance because they don't know why you would
want to otherwise. Another entertainment issue. Remember that these are
model communities, so there will be no drinking, and no
one really pays attention to that one. The native workers
immediately buy their stuff from river boats that come up
(13:32):
on pay day, and according to Grandon, the white linen
suit guys who are trusted to go gather seeds from
the jungle would actually binge on alcohol and get so
wasted that they would start baptizing farm animals with perfume.
Or maybe they just had too much fun square dancing.
I don't know. But the most problematic is with food.
(13:55):
The old way, of course, was eating traditional foods with
traditional service, and and Forward's vision everyone eats in a
mess hall that's incredibly hot inside and only serves Detroit
food wheat bread, oatmeal, and canned Michigan peaches, which is
as Georgians come on and Michigan peaches um. The visiting
(14:18):
writer Charles Morrow Wilson again writes a workman's mess hall
was set up, but native workers did not like the
wholesome Detroit style cooking. And complained bitterly of indigestion. North
American Fair in the jungle no more pleases the customers
than a quick change to Amazon Fair would please you
or me. So the major problem, though, with the whole
food scene is when they cut weight or service to
(14:41):
save money and make the whole dining hall cafeteria style
and a buffet. Yeah, and so the workers, for one thing,
aren't used to cafeteria style food. Um, they're not used
to waiting in line. Again, you're working in the sun
all day and then you have to stand in line
for your lunch. And the result of this change is
(15:01):
a riot. We have one worker saying I'm a worker,
not a waiter, and workers ransacked the dining hall. They
drive trucks into the river. They smash windows and wreck
the sawmill and the radio station and the time clock.
Of course, some yeah and American managers are panicking. They
some seat cover in the jungle, or some go out
(15:22):
onto a boat that's tied up and just waited out.
But it's a bad sign. If the change to cafeteria
style dining sets off a riot, I think you have
a major problem. Our most damning issue, however, is the
rubber itself. So our old way of growing rubber and
harvesting rubber was to gather it from wild trees that
(15:45):
grew spaced out in clumps, and the space provided some
protection from pasts, while these clumps provide protection from heat.
Ford's vision is to plant one point four million trees
in neat rows, because that's how factory supervisors like things.
The problem is that when you do that, it attracts
(16:05):
leaf blight, fungi, and pests like caterpillars less leaving the
trees completely exposed to the elements. So the rubber production,
which is the whole mission of this is completely ridiculous.
It does not work at all, and even if they've
been smarter about cultivating the rubber, the terrain of ford
(16:26):
Land is terrible, as is the climate. The soil erodes.
It's incredibly hot and humid, which is too much for
our Michigan managers. When it rains, the water collects in
low spots, which leads to epidemics of malaria. And when
it doesn't rain, we have a dry season from July
to November where the waters of the river drop up
(16:47):
to forty feet and the boats can't come in, and
it's not just the mosquitoes. We've also got ants and
moths plaguing our people, and we have violence too, so
this isn't just a bad camp scenario. We have things
like knife fights going on, especially in the early days,
but also later with a cafeteria riot and a protest
over the employment of workers from Barbados who the native
(17:11):
workers were upset that these imported workers were getting higher wages.
So Ford finally realizes that he picked the wrong spot.
He admits defeat. Yeah, this whole thing. He kind of
doesn't admit defeat though, because in nineteen thirty four he
trades part of his original concession for seven hundred three thousand,
(17:31):
seven hundred fifty acres to the north and sets up
yet another model town, which is going to be an
improved version of Fordlandia called bell Terra. I hope there's
not quite so much square dancing, so there are some improvements,
like a manager who makes square dancing optional and some
lessons learned. Ford is willing to erect a Catholic church immediately,
(17:54):
which is something he was opposed to doing in Fordlandia.
And we've got doctors who are working to eradicate malaria
with quinine, but This is still no dream city, and
certainly not for Ford. When our Amazon workers unionize in
nineteen thirty nine, seriously, I mean I was kind of
blown away by that fact, unionizing the Amazon workers in
(18:15):
nineteen thirty nine. But unlike for Landia, we actually do
get some crops out of Belterra. Amazing They're pretty pitiful, though.
In nineteen forty two there's a crop yield of seven
hundred and fifty tons of latex, which are from Asian
tree graphs, which are less susceptible to all these pests.
And Ford had hoped though, for thirty eight thousand tons annually,
(18:39):
so clearly we're falling far short of that goal. Harvests
of other crops like eucalyptus, teak and balsa are also
small due to strict regulations of timber exports, and some
are used to trim Ford Lincoln's. So that's a little momentum,
I guess from bel Terra for anyone who has one
of those, But they they have a few other random
(19:01):
things to cinnamon, ginger, coffee, tea. Still nothing much comes
from it. Belterra is not a particularly productive town and
the war World War two is really hard on the
city because German subs actually stop supply ships from reaching
the city. So you can imagine suddenly you're relying on
(19:22):
your little gardens, and it would be tough times without
your Michigan tin peaches. It's finally all over by nineteen
In December of that year, officials at the Ford Motor
Company announced, our war experience has taught us that synthetic
rubber is superior to natural rubber for certain of our products,
(19:44):
and they would return the concession to Brazil for two
hundred and fifty thousand dollars and that's it. So it
makes us wonder how much did this whole thing cost.
It hask to have been a fortune, and it it was.
Ford Motor Company says that it cost about twenty million
in but then a few years later documents came out
that showed it was more like twenty five million. Some
(20:06):
historians put it as much as thirty million, so clearly
a huge waste of money. So it may have been
a waste of money, but at least we've got some
cool ghost towns out of it. They're still there today.
It'll take you about eighteen hours on a riverboat to
get there, but you can look up some pictures and
Google images. They're pretty spooky. And I think there's spent
(20:28):
some talk about reviving Belterra, but not so much for
land is a lost cause still apparently no. I know.
I promised that Sarah might sing a song at the
end of this podcast, but she's actually losing her voice.
So instead we're going to recite what we think would
make a lovely introduction to the Ford Landy of musical
(20:50):
that you're going to write for us. We'll try to
be emphatic about it. There are you ready? I'm ready?
Okay for Landia, Fordlandia, each your oats and don't die
in the malaria. And that is our final word on Fordlandia.
And that brings us to listener mail. Our email today
(21:12):
is from listener Marcella, who wrote about our Madhari podcast,
and she said, my great grand uncle was a reasonably
famous Guatemalan writer at the turn of the twentieth century.
His name was Enrique Gomez Carrio and he was the
Guatemalan consul in Paris from onwards. He was a notorious womanizer,
and family legend has it that one of his various
(21:34):
lovers was Matahari herself. He wrote a book about her,
and while whether he was involved with Matahari or not
is on the level of speculation, he was accused of
being responsible for bringing her to the French authorities and
deceiving her into returning to Paris, where the French detained her,
and in fact, the book he wrote about her was
supposed to be Enrique's attempt to disassociate himself with the
(21:57):
whole case. Enrique's last wife was also somewhat well known,
Consuelos Succin to Santa Supuri, later life of Antoine de
Santi Superi, who of course is the author of The
Little Prince. So thanks for writing to us, Marcella. I
think she also mentioned he's buried in Paras, which is
where Oscar Wilde of course ended up. And if you
(22:19):
have any cool family stories to send us where at
History podcast at how stuff works dot com. You can
also follow us on Twitter at missed in History, or
join our Facebook fan page to see what we're up to.
We recently posted a photo of some of the cool
meal we've gotten, so be share to check it out,
and our homepage is at www dot how stuff works
(22:40):
dot com. If you'd like to search for some great
history articles. For more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot Com and be sure
to check out the stuff you missed in History Glass
Blog on the how stuff Works dot Com homepage. In
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