Sorry, Elon: Henry Ford Started a Colony First

Fordlandia: the Middle-American Town in the Jungle

Building a city in a hostile environment? Mars certainly qualifies. You can only go there every 26 months when its orbit is close to Earth’s. You can’t breathe the atmosphere. The unfiltered solar radiation will kill you. My friend Christopher Minson laid it all out here.

Almost 100 years ago, Henry Ford did something similar: he built Fordlandia in the Amazon jungle. Besides growing rubber trees (more on that later), his aim was to bring Middle American civilization to a place about as similar to the Midwest as Antarctica. It’s a graveyard now.

My source for all this is Fordlandia, an excellent book by Greg Grandin. You can ruminate on Fordandia’s history this week. Next week we’ll consider what it means for Elon’s Mars colony (“Elondia”). I’m leaving out the history that doesn’t apply, e.g. the press and politics in Brazil, the culture of the Amazon before Ford arrived, and the history of the Ford Motor Company.

Fordlandia and Rubber

Rubber trees, Hevea brasiliensis, grow wild in the Amazon jungle. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, rubber was suddenly essential: for car tires especially, and hoses, insulation, waterproof clothes, and lots of other uses. There was no substitute for latex, and until 1900 or so, there was no other place in the world that grew it in quantity. Men made fortunes off it, and they guarded Brazil’s monopoly zealously. Some very rich men in Brazil thought Manaus could become a rival to Paris, and even built an opera house (now a tourist attraction)

Bio Piracy

By the 1870s it was becoming obvious to industrialized countries, not to mention annoying, that they depended on a foreign country for an absolutely critical resource. Henry Wickham, an Englishman who had failed at almost everything he tried up to then, managed to smuggle seventy thousand rubber tree seeds to England, which were in turn shipped to British agents in Sri Lanka. Nowadays almost all of our rubber comes from Southeast Asia. Wickham is reviled in Brazil for this “crime”, although there was actually no law against biopiracy at the time.

Nowadays we would call those trees a “non-native species.” There were no Hevea trees in Asia, which meant no natural predators, either. In the Amazon where Hevea evolved, insect and fungi pests, especially leaf blight, had evolved along with it, and those were a major problem in a rubber plantation. In the jungle, Hevea grew surrounded by other trees, so the pests couldn’t easily travel from one tree to another, but planting them all together made life easy for the pests. Ford’s managers would find this out.

A tree that dripped money, as it were, was an easy sell, and pretty soon rubber plantations sprang up all over Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and much of Southeast Asia. They had no pest problems from planting Hevea in tight rows, which made the farms very efficient. The rubber boom in the Amazon was over.

After World War I, the British and French paid off their war debts partly by selling latex from their Asian colonies. Winston Churchill, then a Cabinet Minister, attempted to create a cartel for rubber, which alarmed Harvey Firestone (yes, that Firestone). He didn’t get much sympathy from American businessmen, except for Henry Ford. Ford wanted to control his supply of rubber, because he always wanted to control everything. Brazil beckoned. He was going to create his own rubber plantation in the jungle.

Two years later, it was clear that Churchill’s cartel idea was going nowhere. The Dutch refused to join. Ford was warned that the high price of latex meant that more trees were being planted and the price would fall soon, as it did. Ford pressed on regardless, and his men found a spot on the Tapajós river, a tributary of the Amazon, for his rubber empire. He got a lease for just under 2.5 million acres.

The Ford Team Sets Sail

In 1928, two giant ships set out from Lake Erie to carry the beginnings of Fordlandia down to their new home. They carried a million dollars worth of goods: steam shovels, road-building equipment, concrete mixers, stump pullers, office equipment, all the supplies to build a railroad, medicine, food, hospital supplies, and much more.

The Lake Ormoc and Lake Farge, captained by a Norwegian, Einar Oxholm, went up the St. Lawrence and down the Atlantic, carrying a chemist, an accountant, an electrical engineer, and managers. It lacked an agronomist, horticulturist, botanist, microbiologist, entomologist, or anyone who knew anything about growing rubber.

The jungle there has a wet season and a dry season, and the river rises as much as thirty-six feet during the wet part. The Ormoc and Farge arrived during dry season, but there was a shoal in the Tapajós that made it impassible for such deep-draft ships. Eventually, at enormous cost they unloaded and reloaded all the cargo onto a tugboat upriver from the shoal and got it to the site.

Unloading

In the modern world, you ship cargo to a port, cranes and/or stevedores unload it onto the dock, it goes into warehouses, and eventually trucks take it to where it’s going. What’s the problem?

In the jungle, though, there were no ports, no docks, no warehouses, and no trucks, or roads for trucks to drive on if there were any.

It turned out that the “special cranes” needed to unload the rest of the heavy equipment was packed first, so they were at the bottom. The Fordlandia site had only a makeshift dock that was too rickety to handle that much weight. Not enough of the riverbank was cleared to receive all that cargo. Some of it had to sit out in the weather, since there were no buildings to store it in. Needless to say, there were no trucks or roads.

Clearing the Site

While waiting for the arrival of the freighters, American manager W.L. Reeves Blakeley, his on-site staff, and their hired workers were busy clearing trees to create the town. There was no place to put the downed trees, so they had to burn them. Unfortunately, it was then the wet season, so the trees wouldn’t burn. They used a lot of kerosene, which of course had to be shipped in from the nearest town.

Workers fell ill and died from malaria, viper bites, and the extreme heat. Progress was very slow. Blakeley gave himself the only decent house, while the workers slept in hammocks and the foremen slept in a hot bunkhouse open to the mosquitos. A Ford dealer from Sao Paolo filed this report back to Dearborn (Ford headquarters) after a visit:

No sanitization, no garbage cans, flies by the millions, all filth, banana peels, orange rinds and dishwater thrown right out on the ground… about 30 men sick out of 104, no deaths but plenty of malaria… flies abounded in kitchen and in all food and on tables and dishes until you could hardly see the food and tables. No screens for men to sleep under, no nets.

The combination of bad living conditions, disease, corrupt management, and bad food led the workers to riot. Scandals were reported in the Brazilian press, and Blakeley was recalled to Dearborn. Oxholm was eventually appointed in his place, despite having no experience in the tropics or in managing a plantation. Henry Ford liked to boast that he didn’t trust experts, and a good man could learn anything.

Oxholm had hired close to 1,000 people by the end of 1929. He found that keeping the workers was something else again: turnover was over 300%, which meant that the management was spending most of its time hiring and training. “Money wages” was a fairly new concept in the jungle; most rubber tappers up to then had been paid in goods, not cash, and there was relatively little that you could do with money down there anyway. There was certainly no reason to buy a refrigerator or a car.

The “Metropolitan Area”

Fordlandia soon sprouted a series of outlying settlements, which were not subject to Oxholm’s discipline. Men didn’t come by themselves; they brought their wives, children, and extended families as well. Many of them were sick and ended up in the Fordlandia hospital. Almost a third of recruits had to spend some time in the hospital before starting work.

Businesses sprung up outside of Fordlandia for all these people. Besides living space, they also offered liquor and prostitution, which meant that venereal disease became a serious problem. Oxholm planned to deduct medical costs from the workers’ paychecks, but Dearborn overruled him: medical care had to be free.

Aside from sick people, he also had to deal with dead ones. By the end of 1929, ninety people had been buried in the company cemetery, even those who were not employees.

Besides camps on land, there were boats: floating bars and bordellos. Workers who were bored flocked to them. Ford’s reputation for strict rectitude meant that Prohibition in the US meant prohibition on all Ford properties, including in Brazil. Brazil had no Prohibition laws, so this didn’t sit well with the locals, and Oxholm finally gave up trying to enforce it.

Growing Things

The economic purpose of Fordlandia was to grow rubber, while a Mars colony needs to grow food just to survive. So the problems will be very different. However, let’s look at how growing things worked out for people who’d never done it before, because clearly no one except Matt Damon has ever grown plants on Mars. We can assume that this is one problem that will be very thoroughly studied ahead of time and they will have lots of agricultural expertise along.

In the Amazon, the land had to be cleared of trees and underbrush just to be ready to plant. As I mentioned earlier, this was done mostly by burning the trees that were cut, which required large amounts of kerosene and gasoline. This was not good for the soil.

At any rate, Ford’s lease required them to plant 1,000 acres of rubber by the end of July 1929, so they dutifully did that, with rubber seeds of dubious quality, on land that had been scorched by the burning. Most of them grew up sickly and had to be plowed under.

Part of the economic rationale for Fordlandia was that lumber sales would tide it over until the rubber trees matured. Unfortunately, since the Amazon is the world capital of biodiversity, there were many more species of tree than Ford was used to in its Michigan forests. Some were too soft, and some were so hard they broke the saw blades. To get the good ones out required felling lots of bad ones. Henry Ford ordered that no trees could be burned, although his son Edsel quietly countermanded the order.

Management Turnover

I mentioned already that Einar Oxholm was the second manager, the first having been fired. By early 1930, four of his children had died, and he’d had enough. He either quit or was fired; it’s not clear which.

Victor Perini was a Ford manager who was persuaded to take on the challenge. When he got to Fordlandia he was dispirited by the amount of work to be done, but he set to work. He hated the jungle, though, and within two months he left and went back to Dearborn. John R. Rogge, a lumberjack who’d been at Fordlandia since the beginning, was named to replace him as manager.

In 1930, it seemed that problems had subsided. New trees had been planted and seemed to be doing well. But trouble was brewing: workers had to eat in the company dining hall and show their badges to get in, and they were sick of being fed oatmeal and canned peaches for breakfast, and whole wheat bread and unpolished rice for dinner, which Henry Ford insisted on for health reasons.

Kaj Ostenfeld, who worked in payroll, was in charge of deducting the food cost from workers’ pay and was said to be condescending and abusive. Workers hated him. Finally it all boiled over and the workers rioted again. “Kill all the Americans” was a chant. They destroyed virtually everything in Fordlandia. Brazilian troops had to be called in to restore order.

If you know your history, you know that the Depression was setting in. Many observers thought that Ford should cut his losses and close the Amazon operation. But no: he doubled down on it. He was bringing civilization to the jungle and profits could wait.

After the Second Riot

A new manager, Archibald Johnston, took over as manager. He managed to make it into a regular Middle American town, as Henry Ford devoutly wished. Two hundred “modern houses” were built for laborers and foremen

and it even had a “Main Street” with shops, and a golf course. Unfortunately, the houses were completely unsuited to the jungle climate: they had concrete floors and metal roofs lined with asbestos, instead of the customary thatch roofs and dirt floors. They were “hotter than the gates of Hell” according to one minister.

Recreation was thought of, too. Fordlandia had regular dances which workers were strongly “advised” to attend. Waltzes, minuets, polkas, square dances, and other old-fashioned dances were featured, and only men were allowed to initiate a dance. Of course, golf was encouraged, too, as a healthy way to get outdoors.

Mother Nature Has Its Way

But now, back to rubber, the whole point of this effort.

Rainfall in the Amazon varies tremendously from year to year. In the jungle surrounded by other trees and understory plants, wild Hevea isn’t affected as much, but planted in rows with no other plants, it matters a lot. They had a very dry year. Johnston finally proposed moving the whole operation to a more suitable location, closer to Santarem, a “town” on the junction of the Tapajós and Amazon. They would have easier access to civilization, such as it was; they could hire contractors to help out more easily; and workers could live or go for diversion there instead of being prisoners in Fordlandia. Dearborn said no.

Although Ford disliked “experts” they finally hired one: a plant pathologist, James Weir, who had extensive experience with rubber plantations in Southeast Asia. Weir advocated a technique called “bud grafting” where a healthy rootstock was grafted to a high-yielding tree. Although Ford itself had commissioned a study on bud grafting back in 1928, no one had bothered to read it. Weir went back to Sumatra to get some healthy clones from which to start. They were in business now, or so they thought!

By 1935, the canopies of the rubber trees began to touch each other, and that, coupled with the morning fog from the river, made the plantation effectively a giant incubator for the leaf-blight fungus. Weir’s Southeast Asian trees had no resistance to the fungus, since it didn’t exist in Sumatra. The search was on for trees that were resistant. By this time, they had a second town, Belterra, closer to the Amazon, which wasn’t as hilly and had its trees planted farther away from the river.

In 1936 they had 700,000 trees planted in Belterra, many with some resistance to leaf blight. Workers were more able to control it with spraying and hand-washing. But then came the insects: mites, lace bugs, black ants, white flies, scale insects, and especially caterpillars. Entomologists kept busy and the workers valiantly struggled against the onslaught.

It turned out, though, that blight-resistant trees weren’t especially high-yielding, and a new technique was developed: “Top-grafting” or making a second graft higher up the trunk, proved to give a healthy root stock, high yield, and blight-resistance! Despite more leaf blight and caterpillars, Belterra yielded 750 tons of latex in 1941. It was considered a good start, although Ford used 25,000 tons a year by then.

The War, the Government, and the Fords

After December 7, 1941 the US was at war, and rubber was a strategic necessity. The Japanese controlled most of the Southeast Asian supply, and the government got heavily involved, not just in the Amazon but all over Latin America. They offered support and high prices for all of Latin America’s latex. Eventually, Fordlandia became essentially a US Government outpost.

Henry Ford had aged visibly. His son Edsel died in 1943. On September 21, 1945, his grandson Henry Ford II was named Chairman. Getting ready for the postwar world by cleaning house, he sold Fordlandia and Belterra to the Brazilian government for $244,200. Ford had invested more than $20 million in them.

Next Week

I was planning to make this one big article, but the Fordlandia story took up so much space that I decided to split it up. So next week we’re going to look at the lessons of Fordlandia for Elon’s “city on Mars” which we’ll call Elondia.