Fordlandia (Greg Grandin)

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
Greg Grandin
Picador
Nonfiction, History
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Few companies can claim to have transformed the world quite like Ford. Though not the first to come up with the assembly line process and other innovations, company founder Henry Ford melded them into an indelible symbol of the modern industrial age, building an empire that changed how people lived and worked. He didn't just sell cars and employ workers: he created a lifestyle, an idealized vision of America that, he was sure, would revolutionize the world and bring about a new golden age, amalgamating industry and agriculture and "pure" moral living. But not every venture was a success. In 1937, with factories hungry for latex and rubber, Henry Ford decided to risk a new, audacious scheme: a rubber tree plantation in the heart of the wild Amazon river basin, one that would not simply produce latex, but would export Ford's work ethics and prove the superiority of his American vision, to the point of conquering one of the last great wildernesses on Earth. He and his agents managed to secure the land, as well as concessions from a foreign government eager to bring some of Ford's legendary prosperity to an impoverished region. But troubles plagued "Fordlandia" from before the first American boot touched Brazilian soil. Rather than be Henry Ford's crowning achievement, it instead became a forgotten footnote and cautionary tale.

REVIEW: I only recently got around to Aldous Huxley's classic dystopian work Brave New World, which posited a nightmarish future where "Fordism" took root around the globe. It reminded me that I'd seen this book once or twice go through the library system where I work, so I figured it might give me some background information on what Huxley was responding to. Fordism was, indeed, a real phenomenon and philosophy associated with Henry Ford and his empire, one whose reach spread far beyond his factories and Model T's... one riddled with seeds of disaster. What Huxley explored in fiction, Fordlandia explores in history, as the decades-long venture demonstrated just how little of Henry Ford's envisioned utopia survived contact with reality, especially reality in the jungle.
The rise and eventual fall of Henry Ford as an American icon mirrors that of many of today's magnates, including the contrast between the truth and popular public perception... and how, the longer their success lasted and the more power they accumulated, the more they drifted into their own worlds, increasingly paranoid and hostile to any who might rupture the bubble. Ford was not the most caring and altruistic man to begin with; one of his most trusted underlings was a violent bully (useful for busting unions and enforcing Ford's increasingly draconian restrictions on what employees could and could not do - even off the clock, in their own homes), he treated his son Edsel terribly, his antisemitism was notorious, and despite claiming to be a suffragist and hiring non-white workers at the same wage as whites, the schools he established in company towns had very clear notions about what women could learn and his factories somehow put Black workers in the most dangerous roles with the least options to advance. In Brazil, the company did not even try to hide the racism; they wrote off indigenous populations as "too lazy" to consider hiring, and more than one Fordlandia supervisor tried to blame labor problems on racial friction. Above all, Henry Ford seemed absolutely convinced that his industrial innovations and a strict enforcement of "traditional" American values and lifestyle (or, rather, a Puritanical interpretation of the rural Midwestern values and lifestyle he grew up with) would create a global utopia... if only he could convince the rest of the world that they were really better off admitting American superiority in all things, from business to culture.
There was, from the start, an inherent flaw in Ford's planned future: the lifestyle he held up as an ideal was the very one that his Model T drove to virtual extinction. That flaw, and others, only became more magnified when the company attempted to establish "Fordism" along with its rubber tree plantation in the remote heart of a foreign country, one where little effort was made to understand local custom, so convinced was the company of its own superior ways. Henry Ford also famously eschewed the very concept of "experts", which did not bode well for efforts to mass produce latex; there's a reason that rubber trees in the wild rarely clustered together (as would inevitably happen on a plantation), as the very jungle where they evolved was of course where there were innumerable insects, fungi, and other pathogens. Only in places like Asia and Africa, devoid of the native pests, could monocultures of the trees be expected to thrive... a lesson that the Ford Company would learn too late, and even then stubbornly refuse to take to heart.
Grandin traces the origins of the concept of Fordlandia from the rise of Henry Ford's global conglomerate and celebrity reputation (and the political situation that enabled that rise), through the plantation's rough history and the parallel hardships and evolution of the Ford Motor Company in America (which quickly transitioned to a bright vision of a future utopia, where workers were actually paid enough to buy the products they helped produce, to a mechanized and dehumanizing nightmare where the workforce was bullied and beaten into submission), and to Fordlandia's ultimate failure and Henry Ford's decline. The aftermath of both the plantation and the industrialization that Ford helped usher into the world - how Ford's original (if unrealistic) grand utopian vision of a future where industry and agriculture would bring harmony has instead become a grim reality of misery and exploitation of land and people at an unimaginable scale (and only getting worse by the minute) - puts the project and Henry Ford's legacy into perspective.
At times, the names and dates could be a little much to keep straight, but overall Grandin does a decent job exploring the subject. Since I originally read this book for context on Brave New World, I did indeed find a new understanding of what Huxley was commenting on with his book, showing the world what an ultimately monstrous and nightmarish future Fordism would bring about if allowed to thrive. The visions offered by today's billionaire industry titans, the spiritual descendants of Henry Ford and his ilk, are no less nightmarish and, I suspect, ultimately at least as toxic and detrimental in their long-term consequences (to be paid by the rest of humanity, of course, never them).

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