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

Greg Grandin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1848311478 ISBN 13: 9781848311473

Publisher: Icon Books Ltd, 2010

Synopsis

In 1927, Henry Ford, the founder of the famous motor company and the richest man in the world, bought a 5,000 square mile-tract of land in the Brazilian Amazon. There he was going to build a rubber plantation. To the unkempt rainforest he would bring the principles of mass production - order, efficiency and productivity. He would harness the river itself in order to transplant capitalist civilisation to the dark heart of the jungle. But Ford wanted more than just rubber. Across the United States, small-town America was giving way to growing cities, consumerism and crass, brash new society. Ford wanted to create in the Amazon an America in his own image - Fordlandia, full of neat houses, straight roads and restrained Puritanism. By 1945 it was abandoned in ruins. "Fordlandia" is the powerful, never-before-told fable of the pride and arrogance of the man who thought he alone could tame the Amazon. Filled with clash and contradiction, it is the battle between industrialised capitalism and the raw power of nature; it is the struggle too within Ford himself, the man who despised the new America that he himself had set in motion, who spent twenty years and several fortunes on his Amazonian dream, yet never set foot inside it. Superbly researched and grippingly told, Greg Grandin gives us a portrait of a man suffering under the grand delusion that the forces of capitalism, once released, might then be contained.

About this title

Review:

Amazon Best of the Month, June 2009: Proving that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction, Fordlandia is the story of Henry Ford's ill-advised attempt to transform raw Brazilian rainforest into homespun slices of Americana. With sales of his Model-T booming, the automotive tycoon saw an opportunity to expand his reach further by exploiting a downtrodden Brazilian rubber industry. His vision, the laughably-named Amazonian outpost of Fordlandia, would become an enviable symbol of efficiency and mark the Ford Motor Company as a player on the global stage. Or so he thought. With thoughtful and meticulous research, author Greg Grandin explores the astounding oversights (no botanists were consulted to confirm the colony's agricultural viability) and painful arrogance (little thought was paid to how native Brazilians would react to an American way of life) that hamstrung the project from the start. Instead of ushering in a new era of commerce, Fordlandia became a cautionary tale of a dream destroyed by hubris. --Dave Callanan

Take a Closer Look at Images from Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

(Click on images to enlarge)

A sketch of the opera house in Manus, Brazil (aka. "the tropical Paris")	An Amazonian family employed in the rubber trade	Ford executives on the deck of The Ormoc en route to the Amazon
Workers clearing the rainforest before construction can begin	Mundurucú mission children with German nuns	A Lincoln Zephyr stuck in Fordlandia mud
Fordlandia's Riverside Avenue near the Tapajós River	Ruins of Fordlandia's powerhouse	Ruins of the sawmill at Iron Mountain

About the Author:

Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University and a Guggenheim fellow. He served on the United Nation's Truth Commission investigating the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for the Los Angeles Times, the New Statesman and the New York Times.

About this edition

• Publisher: Icon Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1848311478
• ISBN 13: 9781848311473
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432