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

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

By: Greg Grandin  

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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 out of 5

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.

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

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

Publisher: Metropolitan Books

Release Date: 2009-06-09

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Solid but not Spectacular - I thought Greg Grandin's Fordlandia was a solid effort. To be honest, I read this book after reading in rapid succession The Lost City of Z and The Thief at the End of the World - both of which cover quite a bit of the same ground and I have to admit to some Amazon and Rubber Trade fatigue setting in. This may have unfairly colored my perception of this book.

I don't have a great deal to add that hasn't already been covered elsewhere so I'll limit my comments. While I liked the book, thought the topic was fascinating and the research comprehensive, it was not one of those non-fiction works that grabbed me and dragged me along like a freight train with a "can't put it down" narrative. And maybe that's the primary thing that was missing for me...I never felt emotionally invested in the outcome, nor did I feel we were building toward something. The book is an interesting and pleasantly written presentation of the facts, and maybe there's a great story in it, but I thought this book sometimes sacrificed a great yarn by being so painstakingly thorough.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Fordlandia - Well written review of the rubber plantation experiment by Ford Motor Company in the 20's 30's and 40's
The book was very detailed and offered personal insites into the amazon jungle experience and how Henry Ford ran and expanded his business empire.
I was mostly unaware of the social experiment side of the Henry Ford story prior to reading this book.
I enjoyed the old and new photos of the plantation and of the Michigan UP expansion and the map of the area in Brazil where the bulk of the story takes place.

Customer Review: 3 out of 5
Henry Ford: deconstructed, ad nauseum, for the umpteen hundredth time - If the author's purpose was to convince people to hate Henry Ford more, then he may have succeeded with some who live on one coast or the other, or humanities professors at public universities. The book truly is well-researched, well-documented and well-written. Once I got into it, it was actually fun to read. But it took me a while to get used to the author's cheap pot-shots, condescending sarcasm and intellectually dishonest, dissembling analyses. The attempt to parallel Ford's jungle adventure with the war in Iraq is a prime example. Another one was: Ford claimed his foremost concern was the welfare of his workers and their families; however he opposed unionization. This, apparently, is supposed to speak for itself. But does it mean that Ford did not really care for his workers or does it mean that he was not very intelligent because he didn't understand the inherent goodness of labor cartels? Did Ford actually think that giving workers good jobs with full benefits entitled him to run his own company?? After that point in the book, I began to enjoy how the fascinating and very scholarly historical presentation alternated with laugh-out-loud absurdity. For example, Ford was able, 20 years posthumously, to control the conduct of the Vietnam War through the person Robert McNamara; Ford is revealed as world-class evil villain by his accepting a medal from Adolph Hitler, which the author insinuates was a reward for Ford's approval of Hitler's as-of-then unhatched plan to incinerate 6 million people whom Ford didn't like either; Ford, with his ill-fated rubber plantation is continuing to destroy 'our' rain forest (and hence in years to come all life on earth as we know it) because crooked loggers are milling lumber 60 years after his death at a sawmill built on the site of Fordlandia; changing the landscape, if undertaken by a private individual such as Henry Ford, is evil. However if his plan to do so, (including extensive planning and engineering) is later used by the U.S. government and implemented as planned (with an important government name like Tennessee Valley Authority instead of a dumb farm-boy name like Fordville) then that is nothing less than heroic. Indeed, the author's reverence of the Roosevelt government is overshadowed only by his glee over the fact that the evil, illiterate, racist, anti-semitic .... CAPITALIST was not paid a dime for all the money, time and effort he and many others put into creating the plan. The juxtaposition of the U.S. government using Ford's idea for this social experiment, after dismissively rejecting it as stupid, and humiliating Ford to boot against pre-war Germany giving him a medal for creating manufacturing processes which were used with great success by the Third Reich could have been used to much greater effect. I'd like to think that the author considered it and then rejected it as too ridiculous, but it wouldn't have been the most ridiculous thing in the book.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Fascinating Story of an American Icon - Fordlandia provided insights into an American legend with a very checkered history. The motive to start a rubber plant in the Amazon was a colossal disaster and the strategies to save it were also ill-fated from one turn to the next. Ford was a dichotomy in and of himself - an innovator and wildly successful businessman in one way and a wayward idealist with dangerous power issues on the other. Fordlandia is probably not part of the orientation program when hiring on at Ford as it illustrates a myriad of wreckless decisions about vertically integrating a business. Ford sort of believed he was infallable due to his successes and he was resolute to make Fordlandia work at any cost. It didn't play out that way as millions and millions of dollars were poured into a worthless white elepant that caused death, media mishaps, and to some extent the unraveling of a charasmatic icon. Very entertaining to read and learn from this piece.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Company Town - When I started this, I thought there was far too much bio of Henry Ford. I was impatient for the Fordlandia adventure to begin. Later I realized how the introductory biography was necessary. Grandin shows how this project defined and reflected the can-do spirit and utter naiveté of Henry Ford.

While not the first of Ford's company towns, Fordlandia was surely his biggest project. The text and photos show the tremendous scale. It was planned to span a region the size of the State of Connecticut. The expense was enormous. Large portions of the jungle were cleared and rubber trees planted. Just the enterprise of planning and constructing just a hospital, or a school, or a row of houses from remote locations prior to the prefab innovation is huge. In an amazingly short period of time construction of this and more was completed and planting begun. They also built a very established looking lumber mill. Later, the jungle was tamed to include a golf course and a swimming pool. The scale is amazing.

It is sad that the energy that went into this went no where. It appears that learn by doing management is a hit and miss affair. To run a commercial farm, you need to know about agriculture and if you don't know, you have to know who does. Henry Ford, who bootstrapped his auto plants, thought that he could follow his gut... throw money at.. whatever ... and have a success in a place where he knew nothing of the people, culture or conditions.

I particularly liked the discussions of the character of Ford, descriptions of the people who came from the US, Brazil, and other places to work in Fordlandia, the Diego Rivera murals and the ultimate fate of the town.

I highly recommend this for readers of general history. If you're interested in a book on a similar topic, The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (Penguin History of American Life) tells the story of the workers who built the canal is a good read.

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