Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City - Hardcover

Grandin, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805082360 ISBN 13: 9780805082364

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2009

Synopsis

The stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon

In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets.

Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest.

More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained.
Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

About this title

About the Author

Greg Grandin is the author of Fordlandia, Empire's Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre, and the award-winning The Blood of Guatemala. An associate professor of Latin American history at New York University, and a Guggenheim fellow, Grandin has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman, and The New York Times.

Reviews

Grandin has discovered an undervalued gem in the story of Fordlandia. The historian balances his narrative nicely between the sometimes comical aspects of empire building in the middle of a wilderness (Paul Theroux's Mosquito Coast comes to mind) and the deadly serious flaws and oversights of such an ill-fated social experiment. The story is as much about the larger question of American values and a country's headlong ambition as it is about Ford's need for latex. Grandin has proven himself a keen researcher and reporter on various episodes in Latin American history -- even if, according to a couple of critics, his retelling of Fordlandia's story is not always a rollicking, cohesive adventure. Nonetheless, Fordlandia is a readable, fascinating account of an obscure bit of history and a penetrating profile of an arrogant man.

Starred Review. Gandin, an NYU professor of Latin American history, offers the thoroughly remarkable story of Henry Ford's attempt, from the 1920s through 1945, to transform part of Brazil's Amazon River basin into a rubber plantation and eponymous American-style company town: Fordlandia. Gandin has found a fascinating vehicle to illuminate the many contradictory parts of Henry Ford: the pacifist, the internationalist, the virulent anti-Semite, the $5-a-day friend of the workingman, the anti-union crusader, the man who ushered America into the industrial age yet rejected the social changes that followed urbanization. Both infuriating and fascinating, Ford is only a piece of the Fordlandia story. The follies of colonialism and the testing of the belief that the Amazon—where 7,882 organisms could be found on any given five square miles�—could be made to produce rubber with the reliability of an auto assembly line makes a surprisingly dramatic tale. Although readers know that Fordlandia will return to the jungle, the unfolding of this unprecedented experiment is compelling. Grandin concludes that Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism—and by extension Americanism.� Readers may find it a cautionary tale for the 21st century. 54 b&w photos. (June)
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In 1927, Henry Ford purchased a tract of land in the Brazilian Amazon roughly the size of Connecticut, with the intention of growing rubber for his automobile factories. During the next eighteen years, Ford invested a quarter of a billion dollars (in today’s money), but Fordlandia, as the place came to be known, was a spectacular failure, its plantations supplying less than one per cent of the world’s latex. In spite of this, the town had a golf course, movie theatres, Cape Cod-style shingled houses, and sidewalks dotted with fire hydrants. A “work of civilization,” in the words of one American associated with the project, it was Ford’s attempt to export the small-town virtues that his own assembly lines were breaking down in the United States. Grandin gives an exhaustive account of the project’s failure and of the light it sheds on Ford; disastrously, he was reluctant to hire native naturalists, who could have best advised him on growing rubber in the region.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805082360
• ISBN 13: 9780805082364
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432