August 29, 2023 • 46 mins
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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. The Wacky Strange History Edition. Get another one.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
I love this one. We got a few people to
thank out of the gate for this, if I may sure.
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, unless it's like, ooh,
(00:43):
doing on shoe soles, 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. I didn't
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 Fordlandia, Greg Grandon wrote a book
(01:07):
called Ford Landia Colin The Rise and Fall of Henry
Ford's Forgotten Jungle City Sporiler Alert. And then there was
a paper in the late seventies by a guy named
John Gaily in the Journal of Inter American Studies and
World Affairs. It also had a lot of good stuff.
So thanks to everyone involved. Here we go.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Wow, that was a lot. I was waiting for you
to tell us who Greg Grandon 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 to kind
of strip a bear right out of the gate. It
was Henry Ford's misadventure down in the Amazon where he
(01:49):
tried to build a model utopian society based on rural Midwestern.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
America right in the Amazon.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
In the Amazon. That's a big that's a big catch
right there, because I 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.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Yeah. Oh, we love our Kansas. I hope they know
that all but one. All but one? 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 up on him one day. I didn't know
a ton about the guy. It did. A lot of
(02:31):
great stuff was also not great in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
That's such a recurring theme, I know.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
In nineteen oh three is where the Ford Motor Company
was born in 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 five dollars a day, and he
(03:00):
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 Dearborn into the homes of my employees
to make sure that the kids are going to school
(03:21):
and everything is tidy, the wife isn't working, and that
people aren't drinking booze.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah. It was the Ford Motor Company equivalent of the Gestapo,
the secret police, who they weren't coming to 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,
(03:47):
to make sure that you were living up to Henry
Ford's personal standards of old timey, squeaky clean americanness.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah, but at the same time he would also, like
I said, pay them a good wage. He would, would
give them great healthcare, he would 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 those things where he was like,
I feel like I'm paying you well and I'm doing
(04:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
He was an anti Semite. It's pretty well trid that
Hitler was at least in part inspired by the writings,
the anti semite, anti semitic writings of Henry Ford. Yeah,
he was a huge fan of square dancing. You could
call it an obsession essentially.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, it's very, very weird.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
He met his wife at a square dance and apparently
he thought that that was the end I'll be all
of rural American life, that that was a perfect pastime,
a perfect symbol everybody should be into square dancing.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
I mean nothing wrong with square dancing. I'm not knocking
square dancing. Just to be clear.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Oh okay, God, 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 t's, 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 Yeah,
(05:29):
he was that kind of old timey vegetarian cook yag exactly,
but he also had some 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
(05:50):
part was the assembly line. But also it might not
have come up with the concept, but he really adopted
something called vertical integration.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, that's the idea. Say let's say you're building cars
and you're like, oh, well, I want to make my
own tires instead of buying them from Firestone. So I'm
going to start making my tires, and uh, well, I
want my own rubber then to make these tires, Like
why pay somebody for rubber if I'm going to be
(06:18):
making all these tires for myself and these cars. And
so that's what inspired the idea for Landy is like,
let's go where the rubber is and buy up land
and start, you know, milking these rubber trees. You know,
milk rubber trees, probably m milk. 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
(06:41):
supply chain by owning it from the from the bottom up.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Right, which means like buying coal mines to to fuel
the vulcanization process of hardening rubber, buying up railroads to
deliver the coal to the factories like that. Yeah, like
owning every aspect of what you need to produce use
your final product. That was what he was into, that
vertical integration. And like you said, I mean that is
(07:05):
why he ended up in Brazil. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Do you know what kind of like titan of industry
you have to be for someone to come in and say,
I'll tell you what's killing us right now? These shipping
costs on the railroads, and he's like, well, let's buy
the railroad then.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, I mean it makes sense and most people might
even think about it, but you can't actually do it.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
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, you know, and
drinks and curses and stuff like that. But this wasn't
(07:45):
a brand new thing for him. In nineteen twenty one,
he tried to do a similar thing in northern Alabama,
near Muscle Shoals, on a seventy five mile stretch of
land where there were some sort of abandoned facil were
two nitrate facilities from World War One, and there was
the construction and well partial construction of the Wilson Dam.
(08:08):
And he said, you know what, let's move there, Let's
restart those projects and get people working and kind of
found a new society there basically where no one was living.
He offered five million bucks to lease the dam. I
guess to the government, and a lot of people in
the government weren't down with it, and it eventually just
kind of fell apart.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Well, supposedly it was just one senator from Alabama who
you really opposed it, Yeah, and it was yeah, yeah,
that's a tradition. Apparently this senator got death threats from
people in Alabama, not just in the Muscle Shoals area,
but like all over Alabama. They had mobilized to start
feeding this million million person workforce that Henry Stower's gun employment. Like,
(08:51):
they changed everything they were doing and started to ramp
up production in anticipation of this, and this one senator
got in the way and said, nope, I was 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 death threats.
Apparently he made a visit to Muscle Shoals and had
to have armed bodyguards with him because he was in
(09:14):
that much in danger that many people were that mad
at him.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
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. 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 grunty groan I've ever heard out
(09:40):
of you.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
It was involunteer. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I know you couldn't even I could tell 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, huh,
I feel like I would just And I know that
you're not going to have an open casket funeral either,
but let's say you did, Okay, I feel like I
would go and lean over your by and just tell
you how great it was working with you all those years,
and you would make that same sound.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Why you say I'm not going to have an open
casket funeral? Do you know something I don't. No.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
I thought you were going to like either be shot
out of a canon or cremated and scattered or sky
burialed or something.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Oh no, that's all. 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 respect to see you later. Good to meet you.
I don't know who you are, but way to go.
All right, that's what I expect people to say.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
It might be that that's what today. So the world
is being industrialized in the early twentieth century. In the
nineteenth 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
(10:53):
grew just sort of where they wanted to grow. It
wasn't like a plantation crop or something like that really grew.
And so along the Amazon they were building little cities
and stuff to support that industry for many, many years.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
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, that'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,
(11:27):
don't remember what episode. Maybe we did one on rubber,
I'm not sure, but 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.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Enemies.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Sure, predators, parasites, yeah, all of those things. It had
none of them, I should say. So those things flourished
like crazy in Sri Lanka and other parts of I
guess central Southeast Asia, that's right, not Central Asia.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, and that really put a dent in the rubber
economy in Brazil kind of collapsed at basically, and following
that in nineteen twenty two, the Stevenson 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
(12:26):
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 Herbert Hoover Hobalt Hoovel steps
up and says, all right, we gotta get some rubber
going on our own now and develop our supply chain,
(12:50):
So go do it. In nineteen twenty four, 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. They were It was
basically like which companies would go there and which companies
(13:10):
would go elsewhere. I think Goodyear ended up going somewhere else,
Firestone ended up going somewhere else. They went to Liberia,
Goodyear went to the Philippines and Sumatra. But Ford was
still 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?
Speaker 2 (13:27):
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 he 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 to I'm
(13:50):
making scare quotes all over the place here, civilize the
people of the Amazon, and basically turned them into world
Midwestern Americans with square dancing on their mind all 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 as great
(14:11):
a place as any because it was such a challenge.
And also if you went to Sumatra or he went
to the Philippines, like 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, I'm
going there.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah, And they said we would like you to come here,
because Henry Ford was, like you said, he was a
business magnet. He was a worldwide, well known name, basically
a celebrity all around the world. And in Brazil they
were like, listen, we need someone like Henry Ford here
to kind of put us back on the map rubber wise.
(14:48):
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 nineteen twenty seven,
they got the Ford Motor Company got a gift of
two and a half million acres alongside the Tapajos river,
(15:09):
and he said, here's the deal. I made a deal
with the government there after twelve years, I could 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. I don't now why they capped
it at nine percent. You know that was ten and
Ford talked him down like a percentage point or something.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Probably they got some kickbacks, about one hundred and twenty
five grand in kickbacks to make it happen between people
who sort of negotiated the deal, which really made Ford mad, because,
as you know, a guy who loves great answing doesn't
like kickbacks, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
No, and one hundred and twenty five grand in kickbacks
in nineteen twenty seven is two point one seven million
dollars today, a lot of money. Yeah, one point seven
h nine million pounds and one point ninety seven one
million euros.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Yeah, which he might have thought, that's very thorough.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Well, you called me out for not having the euro
conversion before, so I would made sure I was prepared today.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Yeah, he might have been a little rankled because he
might have thought he could have paid less for two
and a half million acres there.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
I don't know. I think it was the moral part
of it. Yeah, you hit it on the head. He
was a square dancer.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
So but that was just part for the course, apparently.
I think it's changed dramatically since then.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Yeah, but what you were saying about his like his
desire was more to make that thing. There's a quote
where he said was his desire was not to make money,
but to develop that wonderful and fertile land.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yes, the very quote I was searching for while I
was making that point, but couldn't object. So thank you,
because that's yeah, that's what he wanted to do. But
as far as Ford Motor companies concerned, like they're going
down there to start up a rubber plantation and make
their own rubber, to make their own tires, part of
the vertical integration plan, and so there were there were
(16:55):
not not everybody was on board with this. Yeah, because
anybody who anything about the rubber market said, hey, that
Stevenson planned that the Brits enacted in nineteen twenty two.
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,
(17:17):
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 for it, said no, We're going down to the Amazon,
and he made it happen. He did.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
August nineteen twenty eight. He started shipping stuff down to Brazil.
The problem initially, and 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. But
it was so far inland that these steamerships pulling these barges,
(17:54):
taking all these supplies to literally build a city, essentially,
they couldn't get down these these shallow rivers. So it
took forever. It took like over like well 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.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Yes, they finally did get there in early nineteen twenty nine,
and the steamer captain who was the captain of the
steamership 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
(18:36):
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 innerd Oxholm as the manager
of this plantation and settlement. This, Yeah, the steamship captain
(18:59):
is now run the entire show down there.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Now. Yeah, he had no experience at all and 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?
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Right exactly.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
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 dancings.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Oh yeah, they're called clogs. I think.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Okay, they're gonna be so mad at us.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Who the square dancers?
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Man, Maybe we'll find out it's actually super interesting and cool.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
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 square dancer is maybe how
dare you right? And that's where it's capped.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Yeah, yeah, in all caps.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
So Oxholme hired a bunch of locals. Obviously, they cleared
out the jungle, they started setting up their buildings. The
initial name of the community was Boa Vista, as you
can tell by the name of the title. It was
eventually renamed Ford Landia. This would be a great I
don't know why this hasn't been a movie yet.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
It's surprising.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
I'd say that a lot. But I think in this
case it would be pretty good to be.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
In, like the the spirit of Road to Wellville.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
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 will hit on. But there there
were a number of riots over the period of time
(20:34):
that they tried to get Fordlandia 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.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
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, Yeah, agronomist.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Agronomist maybe I don't know.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
I think I finally hit a pot. 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 they 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.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
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 seemed 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
(21:54):
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 Lvia puts it,
it was like an all you can eat buffet for
these pests. That was bad enough. Then at one point
(22:14):
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, it
tastes better than caterpillar rubber trees. So they literally introduced
a new pest on top of all that.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Exactly, they just like wave it like the caterpillars they
walk past while they were both eating the rubber tree, and.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
They said, you know, it tastes better than rubber trees.
Clogging shoes.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
You know, it tastes better than clogging shoes salva ants.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Wait, clogging is different in square antsing. Someone's going to
call us out on that.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
That's fine, doesn't matter. The point is that salva ants
are one of the few species of insects that are
are prepared and served as food because they're tasting, not
for their protein, kind of because they're taste.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
See, I get your joke now. Yeah, they thought you
were just being cheeky.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
No, no, it's true. I was, but it was also true.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Yet cheeky with a point, which is sort of your motto.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Yeah, that's an album name right there, right, so it's.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
A squeeze album.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
I think they that's a great, great one. The oh yeah,
salva ants tasting. They taste like ginger, lemon, grass and
part of them, and you can serve them on raw
pineapple and they taste amazing. Apparently it really pops. I
don't know if any of the executives are workers in
(23:35):
Ford Landia 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 either 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.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah, exactly, So things are going well. In September of
twenty nine, Ford sitting down a trouble shooter to get
a report, 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.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
So things are not going well, Chuck, Do you want
to take a break and come back and talk about
how things continued to not go well?
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Okay, So things are not going very well for the
(24:54):
Ford Motor Company down in Brazil. But just like with
his workers in Michigan, Ard 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 to like square dancing. So
they built hospitals. They built a really great cutting edge
(25:17):
hospital right there in the middle of the Amazon. They
erected a water tower, which was the highest structure of
the tallest structure of the Amazon for quite a while.
They installed swimming pools and golf courses. There were generators
that produced electricity, their sawmills, like they created the city,
and they also added prefab houses for the workers to
(25:38):
live in. The thing is is like all this stuff
was delivered to them, was given to the workers in
exchange for their labor. But also they paid something like
thirty five 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
(26:02):
Brazilians to say, oh, thank you for giving us running water,
even we'll do anything you want. And they found over time,
as we'll see time and time again, that no, 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 incompetent boobs from Dearborn.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Yeah, but it was also it's also we should point
out that it wasn't it was segregated still like the
Via Americana, which was 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
(26:44):
they had their accommodations weren't as good. They had well water.
They had to live in these and this was again
just thinking you can just transplant a Midwestern American city
and drop it in Brazil. Ill it doesn't work. Because
they had their homes traditionally built off the ground with
(27:05):
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 like
stomach aches and they were getting sick. Because you can't
just go in and radically change a culture's diet overnight either.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
The microbiome does not like that.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
No, So they had square dances though they really did.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
They did have square dances like Not only that, they
also had readings of Walt Whitmen and other American poets
that were pre industrial translated into Portuguese. They said no, no, no,
you can't drink, just like our workers in Dearborn they
said no, no, no, we're not going to listen to you.
And so that one didn't stick. But apparently there was
square dancing, like you said. The problems, though, were not
(28:00):
so much like the houses being too hot or the
square dancing being just non never ending. It was things
like really instituting American ideas like an eight hour ten
or probably ten or twelve hour work day among the workers,
and that's not how they worked before. They would take
(28:24):
time off during the hottest part of the day. Traditionally
when it was the rainy season, they would work less.
When it was 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
(28:44):
executives just expected them to fall into line and to
acquiesce and just do what Ford was telling them to do.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Yeah, and then just little things like many of the
Brazilians would sleep in hammocks every night, and all of
a sudden they were in bed, which isn't the same.
You would think, oh, you get a bed instead of
a hammock. But if you're if you're not used to it,
that's like throwing us in a hammock. Although some people
say brad and hammocks. I don't say good in a hammock,
(29:11):
but they I think. There was an interview in nineteen
ninety four in the South Florida Sun Sentinel with a
doctor from that hospital, doctor Emerick.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Oh boy, I'm so glad you tried.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
I'm gonna say zilagy. Okay, jeez, a word when a
name starts with s z here in trouble right out
of the gate, for sure. But there was a you know,
a nineteen ninety four 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
(29:45):
like cut the mattresses open and dug holes in this
center so they could have that sort of hammocky curve
in their beds. They'd liked midwives to deliver their babies,
and he even admitted we withheld food from these pregnant
women and until they agreed to go to a hospital
and have a nurse to it.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Right. So in Ford's mind, like we're giving you guys
cutting edge hospital equipment and medical care, but you have
to accept it exactly the way that we're presenting it, right,
and not just the medical care, but everything, just the
very existence. As a worker in Ford Landy, you had
to accept it as it was being presented. There was
(30:24):
no adapting to local traditions, local climate, local anything. It
was 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 that has succeeded in that respect.
(30:48):
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 too, Right, there's all sorts of
ones that actually qualify.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
But in this sale, land on planet Earth.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Okay, in this case it did not work because they
were too rigid and they would not adapt to local conditions.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yeah, it was a man crazed with an idea, and
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 nineteen thirty. He
(31:34):
was the original ship captain and then manager of the
whole thing m He told the Detroit News it was
the hardest proposition I ever tackled 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 I talked about the riots that
broke out, they became more frequent and more serious.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
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 and expect them
to do what they were saying and expect them to
understand what they were saying. One of the things that
really that's there's a couple of chapters of Ford Landy,
and the thing that ended the first chapter was, strangely
(32:20):
a transition from table table service cafeteria seating right where
you would just sit at a table and somebody would
come over and bring you food to a cafeteria line
type of food service.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Right and goes stand in the hot sun for your food.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Exactly, and they did not like that. They ended up
getting very hot and getting very angry and very hungry.
Angry 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 Keaitano DeJesus, who was
(33:00):
a brick mason at Fordlandia, said something to Kaj Ostenfeldt,
who was a Ford supervisor at Fordlandia, about the new
cafeteria plan, and ostin feld just basically laughed in Dejesus's face. Right,
And not only did that upset to Hayesus, it upset
it upseted as coworkers who were around two, and in
(33:21):
very short order they started rioting.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
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 hurtin on
those time clocks. Yeah, that they were punching every day.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
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 Fordlandia and occupied it, and
the Ford Motor Companies executives were friends with Juan tripp
(34:06):
Or Gpe, 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 twenty second, which
was the beginning of the rioting day, and they were
(34:29):
fired on Christmas Day, I believe, And that was the
end of the first chapter. Ford Landy just kind of
fell into disuse momentarily, but in very short order Ford
sent another guy, and this guy was the best manager
Ford Landy ever saw. His name was Archibald Johnston. He
was a Scotsman.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Yeah, Yeah, he came in. He said, we need roads,
we need paved roads. We need to connect all this stuff.
He built more houses, he built a movie theater, he
built that dance all because he had to have the
square dancing. Yeah, basically just kind of improvement en mass
to everything, the hospitals, the schools, the living conditions and everything.
(35:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Right. But the thing about Johnston, the workers called him
the white tiger because he was. 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
(35:39):
far as we're old Midwestern expectations were concerned, right, And
he was a success as a result. And I think
he showed up in nineteen thirty one, I believe is
when he took over, and he was there for several
years and under his overseas ship overseership, Yeah, his oversight
(36:02):
as watch. Finally, finally Ford hires a plant person, not
even 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.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Yeah, he hired someone who knew plant right, that was
as basic as a guy. Yeah, James Weir, like you said,
and you know, and this was because you know, they
had the city going and they were building this town.
But there was also the rubber operation that we kind of,
you know, forget about at times in this crazy story.
But they were like, maybe we should actually start, you know,
(36:44):
getting the rubber growing. So he Weir 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 in an area close by. So in nineteen thirty four,
(37:05):
Henry Ford managed to work out a land swap of
a parcel about eighty miles downstream where they built a
new plantation called Belterra, 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
(37:26):
twenty five hundred employees compared to ford Landia's four or
five hundred, so things were going better, but they still
I think at their max. In nineteen forty two, they
produced seven hundred and fifty 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
(37:47):
satisfy what they wanted or what they needed from the beginning.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
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 per used. 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.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
So Ford he his I don't have the impression that
he ever made it down there. I think, oh yeah,
I don't believe he ever did, but he he kind
of ended up getting a little distracted from his company.
He set up a museum of like a rural like
(38:31):
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 was he got less interested in
the company, and so his son became president. I think
all the way back in nineteen ninety nineteen edzel Ford.
But to Henry Ford, his son was just a figurehead.
Apparently at one executive board beating, ezel Ford said that
(38:54):
he was in favor of adding hydraulic breaks to the cars,
and Henry Ford jumped to his feet and said, will
you shut up in the state and the cars the
board meeting. Yeah, and 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
nineteen thirty five he was looking for buyers. The problem
is everybody knew the kind of problems for was having
(39:16):
done in Brazil, and.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Yeah, no one wanted No one wanted it. Yeah, I
don't blame him. Nineteen forty three 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 nineteen forty five as president and kind of
started cleaning house in the company, and any operation in
the company that wasn't doing well went away. And this
(39:39):
and Ford landy it was kind of the tops on
the list, basically, and they managed to sell it back
to the Brazilian government right after all those years.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
At a loss, with all the land and all the improvements,
Brazilian government should sure, why not, We'll take.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
It back exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
The Brazilians turned into a cattle ranch. Is 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 edzel Ford's death
even more ironic too, because edzel Ford got ulcers and
(40:21):
his father insisted that he drinks some unpasteurized milk from
one of Henry Ford's farms, and the bugs in the
milk killed edzel in nineteen forty three. Wow. Yeah, his
own father bossing him around, making him drink unpasteurized milk
from a cow that he didn't even like, killed his son.
That's how Edzell went.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
But he hated cows before that, right.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Yes, he grew up on a farm, so as much
as he idealized royal life, he couldn't stand farm animals.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
You know what, I love square dancing exactly know what
I hate? Cows?
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yeah, they ate the hay that he used to square
dance on, and so he didn't like them.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
I'm looking at a picture of Henry Ford now and
I'm trying to think of who would play him today, Sam.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Rockwell, Sam Rockwall will play everybody.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Hey, that that wouldn't be too bad. You'd have to
age him up a little bit, but that's not a
bad idea.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Actually, you know a movie I keep going back to that.
I just I can watch it almost anytime. I get
the notion I am the pretty thing that lives in
the house. That Osgoode Perkins movie.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
I didn't see that.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
I have definitely told you about it multiple times. Do
you need to put it towards the top of your list?
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Well, you told me about The Devil's his other movie.
What was it about the girls in the.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
The Black Coat's Daughter?
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yeah, Black Coats Daughter.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
I still haven't seen that either.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
No, no, no, I saw it and I didn't like it.
And even Mad at me because of that, like a
year you.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Well, what the good thing about me is I forget
very quickly, so I'm not mad at you anymore. No,
this is this is much much different than The Black
Coat's Daughter, much different.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
I don't have to check that out.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Yeah, it's it's a it's a cozy, cozy, haunted.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
House story, the same rock Well in it.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
No, I was just thinking about that movie.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Gary Oleman could blame too. He does that aged up thing,
chameleon thing pretty well.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
What about Harrison Ford? They have to age him down?
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Love Harrison Ford. Don't like the aging I thought they
did a good job from the trailers. Did you see
Oppenheimer yet? No?
Speaker 2 (42:20):
I haven't yet.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
Gary Olman pops up in that.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Yeah, I heard a lot of people. Do Have you
seen Barbie going tonight?
Speaker 1 (42:29):
It's great, Capital G.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
You're not tell me anything else about it, but I
heard it already hit a billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
Well, it's Capital G great and it's about Barbie.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
Okay, don't tell me anything else though, please?
Speaker 1 (42:42):
You know who plays Barbie? Shh, yes, you know what
I mean? You know, right?
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeah? Of course? Why are you telling me more stuff
about Barbie?
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Though?
Speaker 2 (42:51):
When I've very clearly asked you not to.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
I just wondered if like saying things like it's about
Barbie was too much.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Yes, it is. That's what I'm saying. I like to
go in totally fresh, Well, Sanza.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
It's called Barbie, but it's about Henry Fort.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Awesome and you who plays Henry Port, who's Sam Rockwell,
Margo Roby. Oh, very nice.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
It's quite a transformation.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Yeah, that was all very unexpected.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
All right, well let's wind this up. So rubber, synthetic
rubber comes along. Everything changes. The rubber tree is not
as useful as it.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
Was before because from hero to zero, that's.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
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 abandoned city because there
were a few hundred people that live there for a
few decades. But in twenty sixteen there was a writer
for The Guardian who went down there to report and
(43:48):
they're now like several thousand people who have now moved
into Fordlandia and live there. Working with gypsum, right.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
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 Landy and bell Terra are these abandoned failed you know,
cities that Ford tried. If you ask people in Brazil,
(44:17):
it's like, no, bel Terra and Ford Landy are cities
in Paris State in Brazil. Like they're they They've been
inhabited this entire time and they still are. So they're
they were abandoned by Ford, but not Brazil.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Yeah. But and you can look up pictures today for
Orlandia there are still warehouses. That water tower I think
is still standing, right.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
Yes, I think it might still be operating.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
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,
you just put Margot Roby in it.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
In your golden Okay, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (44:55):
I don't think I have anything else, sir, I don't either.
Speaker 2 (44:58):
Chuck Well, Chuck mentioned Margot Robie again. He unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
That's right, but instead of listener mail, we would love
to talk very briefly about our kids book that is
now available for purchase. Yes, yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
So what we did with McMillan Publishing is is we
took our book for adults, not like it was triple
lex or anyhow, and we kidified it.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
You know.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
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 was what I think
is a great kids.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Book, a dynamo book for young readers.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
That's right, and it's available now, get one for your kids.
It looks great. Everyone at McMillan was so wonderful to
work with, for sure, and it makes a great Christmas
gift or birthday Kiff the stocking stuffer, and it's called
stuff Kids Should Know by you and I and our
buddy Nil's Parker who helped us write this thing.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yes, So where can you get a chuck?
Speaker 1 (46:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
If you hit it with the rock, you have to
buy it store polish. 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 Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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. The Wacky Strange History Edition. Get another one.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
I love this one. We got a few people to
thank out of the gate for this, if I may sure.
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, unless it's like, ooh,
(00:43):
doing on shoe soles, 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. I didn't
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 Fordlandia, Greg Grandon wrote a book
(01:07):
called Ford Landia Colin The Rise and Fall of Henry
Ford's Forgotten Jungle City Sporiler Alert. And then there was
a paper in the late seventies by a guy named
John Gaily in the Journal of Inter American Studies and
World Affairs. It also had a lot of good stuff.
So thanks to everyone involved. Here we go.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Wow, that was a lot. I was waiting for you
to tell us who Greg Grandon 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 to kind
of strip a bear right out of the gate. It
was Henry Ford's misadventure down in the Amazon where he
(01:49):
tried to build a model utopian society based on rural Midwestern.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
America right in the Amazon.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
In the Amazon. That's a big that's a big catch
right there, because I 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.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Yeah. Oh, we love our Kansas. I hope they know
that all but one. All but one? 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 up on him one day. I didn't know
a ton about the guy. It did. A lot of
(02:31):
great stuff was also not great in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
That's such a recurring theme, I know.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
In nineteen oh three is where the Ford Motor Company
was born in 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 five dollars a day, and he
(03:00):
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 Dearborn into the homes of my employees
to make sure that the kids are going to school
(03:21):
and everything is tidy, the wife isn't working, and that
people aren't drinking booze.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah. It was the Ford Motor Company equivalent of the Gestapo,
the secret police, who they weren't coming to 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,
(03:47):
to make sure that you were living up to Henry
Ford's personal standards of old timey, squeaky clean americanness.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah, but at the same time he would also, like
I said, pay them a good wage. He would, would
give them great healthcare, he would 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 those things where he was like,
I feel like I'm paying you well and I'm doing
(04:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
He was an anti Semite. It's pretty well trid that
Hitler was at least in part inspired by the writings,
the anti semite, anti semitic writings of Henry Ford. Yeah,
he was a huge fan of square dancing. You could
call it an obsession essentially.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yeah, it's very, very weird.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
He met his wife at a square dance and apparently
he thought that that was the end I'll be all
of rural American life, that that was a perfect pastime,
a perfect symbol everybody should be into square dancing.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
I mean nothing wrong with square dancing. I'm not knocking
square dancing. Just to be clear.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Oh okay, God, 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 t's, 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 Yeah,
(05:29):
he was that kind of old timey vegetarian cook yag exactly,
but he also had some 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
(05:50):
part was the assembly line. But also it might not
have come up with the concept, but he really adopted
something called vertical integration.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, that's the idea. Say let's say you're building cars
and you're like, oh, well, I want to make my
own tires instead of buying them from Firestone. So I'm
going to start making my tires, and uh, well, I
want my own rubber then to make these tires, Like
why pay somebody for rubber if I'm going to be
(06:18):
making all these tires for myself and these cars. And
so that's what inspired the idea for Landy is like,
let's go where the rubber is and buy up land
and start, you know, milking these rubber trees. You know,
milk rubber trees, probably m milk. 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
(06:41):
supply chain by owning it from the from the bottom up.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
Right, which means like buying coal mines to to fuel
the vulcanization process of hardening rubber, buying up railroads to
deliver the coal to the factories like that. Yeah, like
owning every aspect of what you need to produce use
your final product. That was what he was into, that
vertical integration. And like you said, I mean that is
(07:05):
why he ended up in Brazil. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Do you know what kind of like titan of industry
you have to be for someone to come in and say,
I'll tell you what's killing us right now? These shipping
costs on the railroads, and he's like, well, let's buy
the railroad then.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, I mean it makes sense and most people might
even think about it, but you can't actually do it.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
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, you know, and
drinks and curses and stuff like that. But this wasn't
(07:45):
a brand new thing for him. In nineteen twenty one,
he tried to do a similar thing in northern Alabama,
near Muscle Shoals, on a seventy five mile stretch of
land where there were some sort of abandoned facil were
two nitrate facilities from World War One, and there was
the construction and well partial construction of the Wilson Dam.
(08:08):
And he said, you know what, let's move there, Let's
restart those projects and get people working and kind of
found a new society there basically where no one was living.
He offered five million bucks to lease the dam. I
guess to the government, and a lot of people in
the government weren't down with it, and it eventually just
kind of fell apart.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Well, supposedly it was just one senator from Alabama who
you really opposed it, Yeah, and it was yeah, yeah,
that's a tradition. Apparently this senator got death threats from
people in Alabama, not just in the Muscle Shoals area,
but like all over Alabama. They had mobilized to start
feeding this million million person workforce that Henry Stower's gun employment. Like,
(08:51):
they changed everything they were doing and started to ramp
up production in anticipation of this, and this one senator
got in the way and said, nope, I was 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 death threats.
Apparently he made a visit to Muscle Shoals and had
to have armed bodyguards with him because he was in
(09:14):
that much in danger that many people were that mad
at him.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
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. 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 grunty groan I've ever heard out
(09:40):
of you.
Speaker 2 (09:41):
It was involunteer. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
I know you couldn't even I could tell 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, huh,
I feel like I would just And I know that
you're not going to have an open casket funeral either,
but let's say you did, Okay, I feel like I
would go and lean over your by and just tell
you how great it was working with you all those years,
and you would make that same sound.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Why you say I'm not going to have an open
casket funeral? Do you know something I don't. No.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
I thought you were going to like either be shot
out of a canon or cremated and scattered or sky
burialed or something.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Oh no, that's all. 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 respect to see you later. Good to meet you.
I don't know who you are, but way to go.
All right, that's what I expect people to say.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
It might be that that's what today. So the world
is being industrialized in the early twentieth century. In the
nineteenth 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
(10:53):
grew just sort of where they wanted to grow. It
wasn't like a plantation crop or something like that really grew.
And so along the Amazon they were building little cities
and stuff to support that industry for many, many years.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
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, that'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,
(11:27):
don't remember what episode. Maybe we did one on rubber,
I'm not sure, but 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.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Enemies.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
Sure, predators, parasites, yeah, all of those things. It had
none of them, I should say. So those things flourished
like crazy in Sri Lanka and other parts of I
guess central Southeast Asia, that's right, not Central Asia.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, and that really put a dent in the rubber
economy in Brazil kind of collapsed at basically, and following
that in nineteen twenty two, the Stevenson 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
(12:26):
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 Herbert Hoover Hobalt Hoovel steps
up and says, all right, we gotta get some rubber
going on our own now and develop our supply chain,
(12:50):
So go do it. In nineteen twenty four, 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. They were It was
basically like which companies would go there and which companies
(13:10):
would go elsewhere. I think Goodyear ended up going somewhere else,
Firestone ended up going somewhere else. They went to Liberia,
Goodyear went to the Philippines and Sumatra. But Ford was
still 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?
Speaker 2 (13:27):
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 he 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 to I'm
(13:50):
making scare quotes all over the place here, civilize the
people of the Amazon, and basically turned them into world
Midwestern Americans with square dancing on their mind all 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 as great
(14:11):
a place as any because it was such a challenge.
And also if you went to Sumatra or he went
to the Philippines, like 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, I'm
going there.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah, And they said we would like you to come here,
because Henry Ford was, like you said, he was a
business magnet. He was a worldwide, well known name, basically
a celebrity all around the world. And in Brazil they
were like, listen, we need someone like Henry Ford here
to kind of put us back on the map rubber wise.
(14:48):
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 nineteen twenty seven,
they got the Ford Motor Company got a gift of
two and a half million acres alongside the Tapajos river,
(15:09):
and he said, here's the deal. I made a deal
with the government there after twelve years, I could 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. I don't now why they capped
it at nine percent. You know that was ten and
Ford talked him down like a percentage point or something.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:29):
Probably they got some kickbacks, about one hundred and twenty
five grand in kickbacks to make it happen between people
who sort of negotiated the deal, which really made Ford mad, because,
as you know, a guy who loves great answing doesn't
like kickbacks, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
No, and one hundred and twenty five grand in kickbacks
in nineteen twenty seven is two point one seven million
dollars today, a lot of money. Yeah, one point seven
h nine million pounds and one point ninety seven one
million euros.
Speaker 1 (15:56):
Yeah, which he might have thought, that's very thorough.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
Well, you called me out for not having the euro
conversion before, so I would made sure I was prepared today.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
Yeah, he might have been a little rankled because he
might have thought he could have paid less for two
and a half million acres there.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
I don't know. I think it was the moral part
of it. Yeah, you hit it on the head. He
was a square dancer.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
So but that was just part for the course, apparently.
I think it's changed dramatically since then.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Yeah, but what you were saying about his like his
desire was more to make that thing. There's a quote
where he said was his desire was not to make money,
but to develop that wonderful and fertile land.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Yes, the very quote I was searching for while I
was making that point, but couldn't object. So thank you,
because that's yeah, that's what he wanted to do. But
as far as Ford Motor companies concerned, like they're going
down there to start up a rubber plantation and make
their own rubber, to make their own tires, part of
the vertical integration plan, and so there were there were
(16:55):
not not everybody was on board with this. Yeah, because
anybody who anything about the rubber market said, hey, that
Stevenson planned that the Brits enacted in nineteen twenty two.
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,
(17:17):
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 for it, said no, We're going down to the Amazon,
and he made it happen. He did.
Speaker 1 (17:32):
August nineteen twenty eight. He started shipping stuff down to Brazil.
The problem initially, and 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. But
it was so far inland that these steamerships pulling these barges,
(17:54):
taking all these supplies to literally build a city, essentially,
they couldn't get down these these shallow rivers. So it
took forever. It took like over like well 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.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Yes, they finally did get there in early nineteen twenty nine,
and the steamer captain who was the captain of the
steamership 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
(18:36):
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 innerd Oxholm as the manager
of this plantation and settlement. This, Yeah, the steamship captain
(18:59):
is now run the entire show down there.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Now. Yeah, he had no experience at all and 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?
Speaker 2 (19:11):
Right exactly.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
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 dancings.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Oh yeah, they're called clogs. I think.
Speaker 1 (19:20):
Okay, they're gonna be so mad at us.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
Who the square dancers?
Speaker 1 (19:23):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Man, Maybe we'll find out it's actually super interesting and cool.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
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 square dancer is maybe how
dare you right? And that's where it's capped.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Yeah, yeah, in all caps.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
So Oxholme hired a bunch of locals. Obviously, they cleared
out the jungle, they started setting up their buildings. The
initial name of the community was Boa Vista, as you
can tell by the name of the title. It was
eventually renamed Ford Landia. This would be a great I
don't know why this hasn't been a movie yet.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
It's surprising.
Speaker 1 (20:03):
I'd say that a lot. But I think in this
case it would be pretty good to be.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
In, like the the spirit of Road to Wellville.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (20:12):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
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 will hit on. But there there
were a number of riots over the period of time
(20:34):
that they tried to get Fordlandia 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.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
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, Yeah, agronomist.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Agronomist maybe I don't know.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
I think I finally hit a pot. 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 they 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.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
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 seemed 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
(21:54):
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 Lvia puts it,
it was like an all you can eat buffet for
these pests. That was bad enough. Then at one point
(22:14):
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, it
tastes better than caterpillar rubber trees. So they literally introduced
a new pest on top of all that.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Exactly, they just like wave it like the caterpillars they
walk past while they were both eating the rubber tree, and.
Speaker 1 (22:37):
They said, you know, it tastes better than rubber trees.
Clogging shoes.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
You know, it tastes better than clogging shoes salva ants.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Wait, clogging is different in square antsing. Someone's going to
call us out on that.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
That's fine, doesn't matter. The point is that salva ants
are one of the few species of insects that are
are prepared and served as food because they're tasting, not
for their protein, kind of because they're taste.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
See, I get your joke now. Yeah, they thought you
were just being cheeky.
Speaker 2 (23:04):
No, no, it's true. I was, but it was also true.
Speaker 1 (23:08):
Yet cheeky with a point, which is sort of your motto.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Yeah, that's an album name right there, right, so it's.
Speaker 1 (23:14):
A squeeze album.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
I think they that's a great, great one. The oh yeah,
salva ants tasting. They taste like ginger, lemon, grass and
part of them, and you can serve them on raw
pineapple and they taste amazing. Apparently it really pops. I
don't know if any of the executives are workers in
(23:35):
Ford Landia 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 either 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.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah, exactly, So things are going well. In September of
twenty nine, Ford sitting down a trouble shooter to get
a report, 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.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
So things are not going well, Chuck, Do you want
to take a break and come back and talk about
how things continued to not go well?
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Okay, So things are not going very well for the
(24:54):
Ford Motor Company down in Brazil. But just like with
his workers in Michigan, Ard 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 to like square dancing. So
they built hospitals. They built a really great cutting edge
(25:17):
hospital right there in the middle of the Amazon. They
erected a water tower, which was the highest structure of
the tallest structure of the Amazon for quite a while.
They installed swimming pools and golf courses. There were generators
that produced electricity, their sawmills, like they created the city,
and they also added prefab houses for the workers to
(25:38):
live in. The thing is is like all this stuff
was delivered to them, was given to the workers in
exchange for their labor. But also they paid something like
thirty five 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
(26:02):
Brazilians to say, oh, thank you for giving us running water,
even we'll do anything you want. And they found over time,
as we'll see time and time again, that no, 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 incompetent boobs from Dearborn.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Yeah, but it was also it's also we should point
out that it wasn't it was segregated still like the
Via Americana, which was 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
(26:44):
they had their accommodations weren't as good. They had well water.
They had to live in these and this was again
just thinking you can just transplant a Midwestern American city
and drop it in Brazil. Ill it doesn't work. Because
they had their homes traditionally built off the ground with
(27:05):
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 like
stomach aches and they were getting sick. Because you can't
just go in and radically change a culture's diet overnight either.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
The microbiome does not like that.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
No, So they had square dances though they really did.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
They did have square dances like Not only that, they
also had readings of Walt Whitmen and other American poets
that were pre industrial translated into Portuguese. They said no, no, no,
you can't drink, just like our workers in Dearborn they
said no, no, no, we're not going to listen to you.
And so that one didn't stick. But apparently there was
square dancing, like you said. The problems, though, were not
(28:00):
so much like the houses being too hot or the
square dancing being just non never ending. It was things
like really instituting American ideas like an eight hour ten
or probably ten or twelve hour work day among the workers,
and that's not how they worked before. They would take
(28:24):
time off during the hottest part of the day. Traditionally
when it was the rainy season, they would work less.
When it was 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
(28:44):
executives just expected them to fall into line and to
acquiesce and just do what Ford was telling them to do.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
Yeah, and then just little things like many of the
Brazilians would sleep in hammocks every night, and all of
a sudden they were in bed, which isn't the same.
You would think, oh, you get a bed instead of
a hammock. But if you're if you're not used to it,
that's like throwing us in a hammock. Although some people
say brad and hammocks. I don't say good in a hammock,
(29:11):
but they I think. There was an interview in nineteen
ninety four in the South Florida Sun Sentinel with a
doctor from that hospital, doctor Emerick.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Oh boy, I'm so glad you tried.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
I'm gonna say zilagy. Okay, jeez, a word when a
name starts with s z here in trouble right out
of the gate, for sure. But there was a you know,
a nineteen ninety four 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
(29:45):
like cut the mattresses open and dug holes in this
center so they could have that sort of hammocky curve
in their beds. They'd liked midwives to deliver their babies,
and he even admitted we withheld food from these pregnant
women and until they agreed to go to a hospital
and have a nurse to it.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Right. So in Ford's mind, like we're giving you guys
cutting edge hospital equipment and medical care, but you have
to accept it exactly the way that we're presenting it, right,
and not just the medical care, but everything, just the
very existence. As a worker in Ford Landy, you had
to accept it as it was being presented. There was
(30:24):
no adapting to local traditions, local climate, local anything. It
was 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 that has succeeded in that respect.
(30:48):
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 too, Right, there's all sorts of
ones that actually qualify.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
But in this sale, land on planet Earth.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Okay, in this case it did not work because they
were too rigid and they would not adapt to local conditions.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Yeah, it was a man crazed with an idea, and
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 nineteen thirty. He
(31:34):
was the original ship captain and then manager of the
whole thing m He told the Detroit News it was
the hardest proposition I ever tackled 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 I talked about the riots that
broke out, they became more frequent and more serious.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
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 and expect them
to do what they were saying and expect them to
understand what they were saying. One of the things that
really that's there's a couple of chapters of Ford Landy,
and the thing that ended the first chapter was, strangely
(32:20):
a transition from table table service cafeteria seating right where
you would just sit at a table and somebody would
come over and bring you food to a cafeteria line
type of food service.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Right and goes stand in the hot sun for your food.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Exactly, and they did not like that. They ended up
getting very hot and getting very angry and very hungry.
Angry 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 Keaitano DeJesus, who was
(33:00):
a brick mason at Fordlandia, said something to Kaj Ostenfeldt,
who was a Ford supervisor at Fordlandia, about the new
cafeteria plan, and ostin feld just basically laughed in Dejesus's face. Right,
And not only did that upset to Hayesus, it upset
it upseted as coworkers who were around two, and in
(33:21):
very short order they started rioting.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
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 hurtin on
those time clocks. Yeah, that they were punching every day.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
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 Fordlandia and occupied it, and
the Ford Motor Companies executives were friends with Juan tripp
(34:06):
Or Gpe, 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 twenty second, which
was the beginning of the rioting day, and they were
(34:29):
fired on Christmas Day, I believe, And that was the
end of the first chapter. Ford Landy just kind of
fell into disuse momentarily, but in very short order Ford
sent another guy, and this guy was the best manager
Ford Landy ever saw. His name was Archibald Johnston. He
was a Scotsman.
Speaker 1 (34:49):
Yeah, Yeah, he came in. He said, we need roads,
we need paved roads. We need to connect all this stuff.
He built more houses, he built a movie theater, he
built that dance all because he had to have the
square dancing. Yeah, basically just kind of improvement en mass
to everything, the hospitals, the schools, the living conditions and everything.
(35:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Right. But the thing about Johnston, the workers called him
the white tiger because he was. 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
(35:39):
far as we're old Midwestern expectations were concerned, right, And
he was a success as a result. And I think
he showed up in nineteen thirty one, I believe is
when he took over, and he was there for several
years and under his overseas ship overseership, Yeah, his oversight
(36:02):
as watch. Finally, finally Ford hires a plant person, not
even 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.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Yeah, he hired someone who knew plant right, that was
as basic as a guy. Yeah, James Weir, like you said,
and you know, and this was because you know, they
had the city going and they were building this town.
But there was also the rubber operation that we kind of,
you know, forget about at times in this crazy story.
But they were like, maybe we should actually start, you know,
(36:44):
getting the rubber growing. So he Weir 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 in an area close by. So in nineteen thirty four,
(37:05):
Henry Ford managed to work out a land swap of
a parcel about eighty miles downstream where they built a
new plantation called Belterra, 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
(37:26):
twenty five hundred employees compared to ford Landia's four or
five hundred, so things were going better, but they still
I think at their max. In nineteen forty two, they
produced seven hundred and fifty 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
(37:47):
satisfy what they wanted or what they needed from the beginning.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
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 per used. 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.
Speaker 1 (38:09):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
So Ford he his I don't have the impression that
he ever made it down there. I think, oh yeah,
I don't believe he ever did, but he he kind
of ended up getting a little distracted from his company.
He set up a museum of like a rural like
(38:31):
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 was he got less interested in
the company, and so his son became president. I think
all the way back in nineteen ninety nineteen edzel Ford.
But to Henry Ford, his son was just a figurehead.
Apparently at one executive board beating, ezel Ford said that
(38:54):
he was in favor of adding hydraulic breaks to the cars,
and Henry Ford jumped to his feet and said, will
you shut up in the state and the cars the
board meeting. Yeah, and 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
nineteen thirty five he was looking for buyers. The problem
is everybody knew the kind of problems for was having
(39:16):
done in Brazil, and.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
Yeah, no one wanted No one wanted it. Yeah, I
don't blame him. Nineteen forty three 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 nineteen forty five as president and kind of
started cleaning house in the company, and any operation in
the company that wasn't doing well went away. And this
(39:39):
and Ford landy it was kind of the tops on
the list, basically, and they managed to sell it back
to the Brazilian government right after all those years.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
At a loss, with all the land and all the improvements,
Brazilian government should sure, why not, We'll take.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
It back exactly.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
The Brazilians turned into a cattle ranch. Is 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 edzel Ford's death
even more ironic too, because edzel Ford got ulcers and
(40:21):
his father insisted that he drinks some unpasteurized milk from
one of Henry Ford's farms, and the bugs in the
milk killed edzel in nineteen forty three. Wow. Yeah, his
own father bossing him around, making him drink unpasteurized milk
from a cow that he didn't even like, killed his son.
That's how Edzell went.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
But he hated cows before that, right.
Speaker 2 (40:41):
Yes, he grew up on a farm, so as much
as he idealized royal life, he couldn't stand farm animals.
Speaker 1 (40:48):
You know what, I love square dancing exactly know what
I hate? Cows?
Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yeah, they ate the hay that he used to square
dance on, and so he didn't like them.
Speaker 1 (40:57):
I'm looking at a picture of Henry Ford now and
I'm trying to think of who would play him today, Sam.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
Rockwell, Sam Rockwall will play everybody.
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Hey, that that wouldn't be too bad. You'd have to
age him up a little bit, but that's not a
bad idea.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Actually, you know a movie I keep going back to that.
I just I can watch it almost anytime. I get
the notion I am the pretty thing that lives in
the house. That Osgoode Perkins movie.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
I didn't see that.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
I have definitely told you about it multiple times. Do
you need to put it towards the top of your list?
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Well, you told me about The Devil's his other movie.
What was it about the girls in the.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
The Black Coat's Daughter?
Speaker 1 (41:36):
Yeah, Black Coats Daughter.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
I still haven't seen that either.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
No, no, no, I saw it and I didn't like it.
And even Mad at me because of that, like a
year you.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
Well, what the good thing about me is I forget
very quickly, so I'm not mad at you anymore. No,
this is this is much much different than The Black
Coat's Daughter, much different.
Speaker 1 (41:53):
I don't have to check that out.
Speaker 2 (41:54):
Yeah, it's it's a it's a cozy, cozy, haunted.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
House story, the same rock Well in it.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
No, I was just thinking about that movie.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Gary Oleman could blame too. He does that aged up thing,
chameleon thing pretty well.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
What about Harrison Ford? They have to age him down?
Speaker 1 (42:13):
Love Harrison Ford. Don't like the aging I thought they
did a good job from the trailers. Did you see
Oppenheimer yet? No?
Speaker 2 (42:20):
I haven't yet.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
Gary Olman pops up in that.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Yeah, I heard a lot of people. Do Have you
seen Barbie going tonight?
Speaker 1 (42:29):
It's great, Capital G.
Speaker 2 (42:31):
You're not tell me anything else about it, but I
heard it already hit a billion dollars.
Speaker 1 (42:35):
Well, it's Capital G great and it's about Barbie.
Speaker 2 (42:38):
Okay, don't tell me anything else though, please?
Speaker 1 (42:42):
You know who plays Barbie? Shh, yes, you know what
I mean? You know, right?
Speaker 2 (42:48):
Yeah? Of course? Why are you telling me more stuff
about Barbie?
Speaker 1 (42:50):
Though?
Speaker 2 (42:51):
When I've very clearly asked you not to.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
I just wondered if like saying things like it's about
Barbie was too much.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Yes, it is. That's what I'm saying. I like to
go in totally fresh, Well, Sanza.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
It's called Barbie, but it's about Henry Fort.
Speaker 2 (43:06):
Awesome and you who plays Henry Port, who's Sam Rockwell,
Margo Roby. Oh, very nice.
Speaker 1 (43:11):
It's quite a transformation.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Yeah, that was all very unexpected.
Speaker 1 (43:14):
All right, well let's wind this up. So rubber, synthetic
rubber comes along. Everything changes. The rubber tree is not
as useful as it.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
Was before because from hero to zero, that's.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
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 abandoned city because there
were a few hundred people that live there for a
few decades. But in twenty sixteen there was a writer
for The Guardian who went down there to report and
(43:48):
they're now like several thousand people who have now moved
into Fordlandia and live there. Working with gypsum, right.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
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 Landy and bell Terra are these abandoned failed you know,
cities that Ford tried. If you ask people in Brazil,
(44:17):
it's like, no, bel Terra and Ford Landy are cities
in Paris State in Brazil. Like they're they They've been
inhabited this entire time and they still are. So they're
they were abandoned by Ford, but not Brazil.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
Yeah. But and you can look up pictures today for
Orlandia there are still warehouses. That water tower I think
is still standing, right.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
Yes, I think it might still be operating.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
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,
you just put Margot Roby in it.
Speaker 2 (44:51):
In your golden Okay, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (44:55):
I don't think I have anything else, sir, I don't either.
Speaker 2 (44:58):
Chuck Well, Chuck mentioned Margot Robie again. He unlocked listener mail.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
That's right, but instead of listener mail, we would love
to talk very briefly about our kids book that is
now available for purchase. Yes, yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 2 (45:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
So what we did with McMillan Publishing is is we
took our book for adults, not like it was triple
lex or anyhow, and we kidified it.
Speaker 2 (45:25):
You know.
Speaker 1 (45:26):
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 was what I think
is a great kids.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Book, a dynamo book for young readers.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
That's right, and it's available now, get one for your kids.
It looks great. Everyone at McMillan was so wonderful to
work with, for sure, and it makes a great Christmas
gift or birthday Kiff the stocking stuffer, and it's called
stuff Kids Should Know by you and I and our
buddy Nil's Parker who helped us write this thing.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yes, So where can you get a chuck?
Speaker 1 (46:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:18):
If you hit it with the rock, you have to
buy it store polish. 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 Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (46:39):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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