Robert Lacey
MODEL FAILURE
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
By Greg Grandin (Icon Books 416pp £14.99)
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Reviewers have rightly compared this important and enjoyable book to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. But with Oscar season upon us, perhaps another comparison is called for - to James Cameron's box-office-topping parable of American utopianism and arrogance, Avatar. Greg Grandin, an academic with a gift for sharp characterisation and storytelling, is positively cinematic as he describes the fate of Henry Ford's attempt to build small-town America in the wilds of the Amazon basin. But he goes a step beyond Avatar. Fordlandia shows what happens after the Blue People have triumphed.
In 1927 Henry Ford, at that time the richest and possibly most famous man on earth, bought a tract of Brazilian land the size of Northern Ireland in what was then called the jungle, and what we now call the rainforest. In emulation of his friend, the tyre magnate Harvey Firestone, who was building a plantation in Liberia, Ford planned to grow rubber for his cars. But Fordlandia soon expanded into a grandiose project to export small-town America itself to the banks of the Amazon - two small towns, in fact, after $20 million had been spent on bungalows, ice cream shops, Model T Fords (of course), bandstands, gardening clubs and even a golf course. Golf develops 'foresight and perseverance', explained Ford's private newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, since the 'golfer never looks backward; "Fore!" is his slogan, and his aim is to drive his ball clear of all traps and pitfalls'.
Grandin captures the paradoxes of Henry Ford - part farm boy, part Stalin - from the great man's sunny confidence that he could humanise the harshness of industrial capitalism with the values of the rural Midwest in which he grew up, to his sinister reliance on the gun-toting, union-bashing goons of Harry Bennett's 'Service Department', and his own deep-rooted and notorious anti-Semitism. Grandin has used original sources and first-hand interviews to retell some familiar stories in a fresh way. He has visited the Amazon to capture the ruins of Ford's forest dream and his photographs are well chosen. One of the most chilling images shows the serried ranks of crosses laid out in Fordlandia's graveyard, as if in a war cemetery: for quite long periods of time, it seems, someone was dying every day in Henry Ford's brave new world.
In Avatar the ruthless bulldozers and movie gunships of the Sky People (read Americans) are ultimately defeated by the primitive forces of nature that have been unleashed - and so it was with Fordlandia. Through all the carmaker's expensive and complicated (and, it must be said, fundamentally well meaning) attempts at social engineering ran an extraordinary streak of incompetence. While devoting endless time and resources to transferring their master's eccentric (and, again, largely benign) theories of hospital practice to the colony, Ford's succession of managers assigned little value to actual expertise in growing rubber. The first arrivals cleared the forest with massive gasoline fires, thus poisoning the ground for cultivation. Their successors only realised too late that their strategy of concentrating rubber trees close together in plantations made the plants sitting targets for leaf blight and the various other local pests that had already driven rubber cultivation to the opposite side of the world. The fundamental impossibility of mass-producing rubber in the Amazon means that Brazil imports its rubber to this day.
Grandin relates his comedy of disasters in a cascade of wonderfully evolving anecdotes. There are a few small mistakes. The Arab Revolt broke out in 1916 not 1922, when T E Lawrence was safely under cover in the RAF. The economic expansion of post-war America cannot be explained by a notional deal between FDR and Ibn Saud to fix the price of oil, which was a matter of much broader, worldwide demand. But on his chosen ground the author moves forward with a surefootedness, drive and gusto that suggest he might have picked up his writing skills on one of Mr sFord's golf courses.
Grandin's greatest skill is that he neither simplifies nor opts for the easy target. For all his ruthlessness, Henry Ford was moved by decent, indeed lofty ideals. It is easy to laugh at his faith in the power of unpolished rice and square dancing, but no other US titan of industry would have squandered such resources on his misplaced utopia. In the end, the Ford Motor Company walked away with $244,200 in return for an investment that cost more than $20 million.
Nor does the author sentimentalise the life of the locals before or after the twenty-year experiment of Fordlandia. He documents the many miseries of native life that Ford worked to alleviate, if only temporarily. In describing the Amazon of today, he powerfully portrays the disease-ridden jungle slavery that is the human dimension of deforestation. These painful, on-the-ground horrors - 'people who have absolutely no economic value except under the most inhumane conditions imaginable' - render our Western distress over the destruction of the rainforest almost effete.
This makes it all the more poignant to discover a possible modern offspring of Henry Ford's experiment. In 1941 Walt Disney visited Brazil under the auspices of Nelson Rockefeller's US government project to integrate the Americas, commercially and culturally. He flew down the Amazon to inspect Fordlandia. The creator of Mickey Mouse was impressed, and he incorporated what he saw into his planning for Disneyland.
Robert Lacey is the author of 'Ford: The Men and the Machine' (1986). His latest book is 'Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia' (Hutchinson).