“The force of industrial capitalism helped to unleash,” writes Greg Grandin in his definitive history of Fordlandia, “was undermining the world he hoped to restore.” In 1928, he went as far as to announce: “We are not going to South America to make money, but to help develop that wonderful and fertile land.”īut the move also represented a certain disenchantment with his home country, and a desire to start from scratch in the blank slate of the Amazon jungle. He believed the values that had made his company a success would build character anywhere else on the planet. In his utopian mind, Ford’s plan for growing rubber in the Amazon was (as one state department official later described it) a “work of civilisation”. Increasing rubber prices gave a practical aspect to his dream. He had reportedly first become interested by the area after hearing ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, a personal friend, tell of his journey down the river. We are not going to South America to make money, but to help develop that wonderful and fertile land Henry Fordįresh off the failure of his Alabama development, Ford grew fascinated with the economically ravaged Amazon as a potential site for a reboot of his utopian aspirations. The Amazon basin, heavily dependent on proceeds from rubber sales, was devastated. And by the beginning of the century, this produce was vastly outperforming Brazil’s rubber crop. The British began growing rubber in Sri Lanka, after a rubber tree’s seeds were famously smuggled out of Brazil. And though these trees only grew natively in Brazil, it wasn’t long before enterprising botanists decided they would try planting them in other tropical regions, where they had no natural parasites. Photograph: The collections of Henry Fordīut the cultivation of rubber trees could not be standardised placing them too close together exposed them to blight and parasites. The sawmill and power house at Fordlandia were abandoned in 1945. Belem, at the mouth of the river, became the busiest port in Brazil upriver, Manaus became world famous for its decadent Amazon Theatre. At the end of the previous century, the region had benefited from a monopoly on global rubber production, skyrocketing demands, and easy transportation via the navigable waters of the Amazon river.Ĭities along the river had swelled with new residents seeking their fortunes, and had lined their streets with opulent new buildings. ‘A work of civilisation’īy the 1920s, the Amazon basin lay in shambles. While he succeeded in bringing some of his smaller urban planning concepts to life, his much larger project, a massive manufacturing city to be built in northern Alabama – 75 miles long, with power supplied by damming the Tennessee river – never got off the ground.Įventually, Ford settled on a location for his ideal city that was a good deal further south than Alabama: the Amazon. He became increasingly convinced that his role in advancing society had to go beyond the factory floor, and encompass entire cities. The Rev Samuel Marquis, one the heads of Ford’s employee relations office, once proclaimed that Ford’s cars were “the by-products of his real business, which is the making of men”.īut some of Ford’s social ideas were highly sinister – most notoriously his anti-semitism, which featured prominently in a newspaper he himself printed, the Dearborn Independent. He took pride in the fair treatment of his staff, and in 1914, to great fanfare, he proclaimed that all Ford workers would receive a daily salary of $5 (the equivalent of $120 (£90) today).įord believed fair treatment would make his workers more responsible citizens and, in the process, solidify a client base for manufacturers.
Yet Ford’s greatest innovation was arguably not mechanical, but social. Within a decade of its founding in Dearborn, Michigan in 1903, the Ford Motor Company had revolutionised car production by introducing the assembly line – isolating tasks within the complex process of car assembly, allowing new models of his flagship vehicle, the Model T, to be cranked out faster than ever before, making the company a global success.
In his day, Ford’s name was every bit as evocative of the glimmering promise of technological revolution as Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg – perhaps even more so. It is difficult to overstate the reputation Henry Ford had built for himself by that time – whether in Brazil, America, or anywhere else on the planet.
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