Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and our topic
Speaker 1: today is fort Landia, which is Henry Ford's failed attempt
Speaker 1: at this utopian company town in the middle of the Amazon.
Speaker 1: And the idea sounds good enough. They're gonna be neet
Speaker 1: suburban homes and swimming pools and doctors and wholesome Detroit
Speaker 1: style food. I don't know about that. Well, let's just
Speaker 1: roll with me here for a minute. Time clocks that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. There will not be malaria, knife fights,
Speaker 1: wasted money, or caterpillars, clearly. But guess what, it does
Speaker 1: not work out at all. And this was a suggestion
Speaker 1: that Candice had given us a few months back after
Speaker 1: press coverage for Greg Grandon's book fort Landia, The Rise
Speaker 1: and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Uncle City came out
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of good information we were able
Speaker 1: to pull from reviews and such, but we still haven't
Speaker 1: gotten our hands on a copy to read the entire thing.
Speaker 1: Actually put my name on the waiting list at the library,
Speaker 1: so fingers crossed. But the book did really well. So
Speaker 1: I'm hoping that the next step for this for Landia
Speaker 1: Reliving will be in musical. And if someone listens to
Speaker 1: this podcast and then goes and write some musical, I
Speaker 1: want to get some tickets to that, please. And Sarah
Speaker 1: has a pitch for an opening chorus, so if you're
Speaker 1: good and listen to the whole podcast, she just might
Speaker 1: sing it at the end. We'll see how it goes.
Speaker 1: But first we're going to give you a little bit
Speaker 1: of background on the man behind Fordlandia, Henry Ford, and
Speaker 1: by the nineteen twenties, Henry Ford had been in the
Speaker 1: motor car business for decades. He's established his moving assembly line,
Speaker 1: He's rolled out the Model T and even the Model
Speaker 1: a UM. He's revolutionized the industrial working world with his
Speaker 1: labor theories, the five dollar work day at the forty
Speaker 1: hour work week, profit sharing, and he's also dabbled in
Speaker 1: the idea of model communities, which it's probably a natural
Speaker 1: extension for someone who's so interested in model factories, definitely,
Speaker 1: According to an article by Wayne Curtis, so far this
Speaker 1: dabbling and model communities has gone pretty well. He's set
Speaker 1: up a small logging village in northern Michigan, and that's
Speaker 1: worked out fine. He's stopped them with everything a working
Speaker 1: man could want, you know, their w rec centers, schools
Speaker 1: for the kids, churches. But by the late nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: for It is still feeling a little discouraged. Despite all
Speaker 1: these accomplishments. World War One has sort of shaken him
Speaker 1: up a little bit and people aren't so crazy about
Speaker 1: all his anti Semitic views. And you imagine, and he's
Speaker 1: an older guy now too, He's in his sixties, and
Speaker 1: he's starting to look back to his own rustic, sort
Speaker 1: of rural past and feel a little nostalgia for it.
Speaker 1: So when he has a business opportunity to ablish his
Speaker 1: own rubber production company in Brazil, he jumps at the chance.
Speaker 1: He has this challenge now of creating a model community
Speaker 1: around this and think of how impressive that would be,
Speaker 1: taming the Amazon into this series of paved suburban streets.
Speaker 1: I'm speaking as Henry Ford here, not as myself, and
Speaker 1: creating a society that's connected to global industry, but still
Speaker 1: small and quaint enough to grow its own vegetables, raise
Speaker 1: its own animals too, to be its own little place. Homi. Yes,
Speaker 1: a US diplomat actually calls it like it is, and
Speaker 1: he says Mr Ford considers the project a work of civilization.
Speaker 1: So it's not just a business prospect. It's really this
Speaker 1: whole utopian idea. But we have to wonder first why rubber,
Speaker 1: why the Amazon, And to understand that, we need to
Speaker 1: go back a little bit into the nineteenth century and
Speaker 1: talk about some rubber barons. So rubber trees are native
Speaker 1: to the Amazon, and when rubber became global commodity in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century, some people became very, very rich. But
Speaker 1: then Englishman Henry Wickham smuggled out sacks of seeds, and
Speaker 1: eventually people discovered that rubber actually grew a lot better
Speaker 1: in Southeast Asia, where none of its natural predators lived.
Speaker 1: And because there aren't natural predators, you can establish huge
Speaker 1: plantations full of rubber trees that produce a consistent product,
Speaker 1: unlike South American rubber, which was still collected from wild trees.
Speaker 1: So the rubber barons of South America are just out
Speaker 1: of luck. Yeah. Also, according to Robert Santos, is the
Speaker 1: economic history of the Amazon. British and American companies were
Speaker 1: already sort of looking to get rubber production out of Brazil,
Speaker 1: partly because anti slavery campaigners were not a fan of
Speaker 1: South American labor conditions. But decades later, Ford is concerned
Speaker 1: about this Asian corner that's developed on the rubber market,
Speaker 1: and he has to have rubber for his car tires.
Speaker 1: He can't really afford to mess around have this one
Speaker 1: major source of rubber somehow be cut off to him.
Speaker 1: And he's also, yeah, he doesn't want to ship it
Speaker 1: from halfway around the world. Yeah, if, if, if it
Speaker 1: can be grown in South America, he would rather import
Speaker 1: it from South America than Asia. And so he gets
Speaker 1: the idea that if he established his own rubber plantation
Speaker 1: in South America, he wouldn't have to worry about any
Speaker 1: of the outside factors. He would own it, he could
Speaker 1: control the costs, and he could ensure that the industry
Speaker 1: wouldn't be monopolized. And that brings me to your my
Speaker 1: favorite line and the stairs outline. But he'll do it
Speaker 1: his way, the forward way, which makes us both saying board.
Speaker 1: And he's not the first guy to have thought of
Speaker 1: American controlled rubber production. Back in nine three, the US
Speaker 1: government had started looking into the rubber resources of South
Speaker 1: and Central America. A University of Michigan botanist Carl LaRue
Speaker 1: flags a spot in Brazil near way the Tapajos River
Speaker 1: feeds into the Amazon. By nine, Ford has chosen this
Speaker 1: spot as his own and has arranged a deal with
Speaker 1: the Brazilian government two point five million acres of land,
Speaker 1: plus police protection and duty free imports of supplies in
Speaker 1: exchange for nine percent of the plantations profits after twelve
Speaker 1: years and in n the supplies from Dearborn start heading south.
Speaker 1: So the plan is in action. And four months later
Speaker 1: we have a steamer and a barge arrived with this
Speaker 1: pile driver, steam, shovel, tractors, locomotive, prefab buildings, parts for
Speaker 1: a saw mill, basically everything that you would need to
Speaker 1: set up a suburban company to creative machine, except that
Speaker 1: it's in the Amazon. And it's basically a company on
Speaker 1: a boat company a industrial do Brazil, which is going
Speaker 1: to be Ford Motor Companies Rubber Harvesting Division. And that's
Speaker 1: how a spot named Boa Vista becomes Fordlandia. The intention
Speaker 1: or the plan is to employ people, house a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand and exports six million tons of rubber a year.
Speaker 1: So let's see how it goes. So it doesn't take
Speaker 1: that long to actually set up the town. The town
Speaker 1: is going to be run by managers imported from Michigan,
Speaker 1: and Native workers will be the ones who are collecting
Speaker 1: the rubber and doing other tasks that are related to
Speaker 1: to running the whole the whole city, the whole model city,
Speaker 1: and the native workers are pretty interested by this job
Speaker 1: because Ford pays wages that are double to what they're
Speaker 1: used to receiving. Plus you get housing and medical care
Speaker 1: and food, so it sounds nice enough. And you know,
Speaker 1: the houses look very cute, situated on neat little streets
Speaker 1: with lawns that got power lines run by a diesel generator.
Speaker 1: The workers have access to well water from spicketts, while
Speaker 1: the white collar and US workers have running water inside
Speaker 1: several schools. They're swimming pools these Michigan made fire hydrants.
Speaker 1: And the Villa Brasilia part of town has Taylor's shops, restaurants, shoemakers,
Speaker 1: a butcher, a baker, not sure about the candlestickmaker, but
Speaker 1: they're all subsidized, and working mothers have a nursery or
Speaker 1: a baby clinic. And again as far as health goes,
Speaker 1: if you die, you get a paid funeral with a
Speaker 1: US made coffin. I'm kind of imagining that on their
Speaker 1: promotional brochures like and if you die baby clinics often. Um,
Speaker 1: but there are issues, and the main issue is just
Speaker 1: ignoring the customs of the people, ignoring the climate, ignoring
Speaker 1: how work is done in the Amazon, ignorance in general. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it reminded me of when we talked about the Jamestown
Speaker 1: settlers who are trying to live in North America like
Speaker 1: it's old England and making fatal mistakes. So we have
Speaker 1: fatal mistakes made here too, and we're going to start
Speaker 1: with housing. So the traditional form of housing in this
Speaker 1: area is uh sued well suited to the heat and
Speaker 1: the humidity of the Amazon. You have cool dirt floors
Speaker 1: and thatch roofs. But the new style in Fordlandia is
Speaker 1: cute little Swiss cottages cape cod style model homes, all
Speaker 1: with asbestos insulated metal roofs. So you can see where
Speaker 1: this is gonna go. With a an insulated metal roof
Speaker 1: under the Amazon sun. One employee calls them galvanized iron
Speaker 1: bake ovens, and a Harper's reporter said that Mr. Ford
Speaker 1: and Brazil are somewhat in disagreement in matters of doors, screening,
Speaker 1: and heights of ceiling, so the houses are not too
Speaker 1: Most of the people's suiting. The indoor bathrooms gross out
Speaker 1: the workers. They don't like having that all in the house.
Speaker 1: So this is an immediate problem for making for landia work.
Speaker 1: And the rubber harvesting doesn't go well either. Again, the
Speaker 1: traditional way workers lived um kind of spaced out and
Speaker 1: they harvest their latex and get paid by the pounds,
Speaker 1: so for what they actually accomplished. The Ford Way workers
Speaker 1: lived in suburbia. They go to work every day and
Speaker 1: this requires them to keep track of their hours, so
Speaker 1: how long they've been there as opposed to what they
Speaker 1: actually produce. And there's this Flintstone's style whistle that's mounted
Speaker 1: on top of the water tower that can be heard
Speaker 1: at seven miles away, and it signals meals the start
Speaker 1: and the end of every work day. And it gets
Speaker 1: even worse than that because these old time management systems
Speaker 1: don't mesh. Well. Yeah, the old way is to use
Speaker 1: the sun and the seasons as your clock and calendar.
Speaker 1: So when you're harvesting rubber, obviously you work at the
Speaker 1: coolest parts of the day, so you work at dawn,
Speaker 1: you work at dusk. You don't work from six to three,
Speaker 1: which is going to be the Ford schedule. And the
Speaker 1: new ways also, uh we have the whistle we just mentioned,
Speaker 1: but also punch clocks like like it's great like and barrel. Yes,
Speaker 1: I know that from experience. So you'd have to swing
Speaker 1: by the main building on your way to the fields,
Speaker 1: even if it meant a detour, just to punch in
Speaker 1: this clock. And to make things even more ridiculous, we're
Speaker 1: running on Detroit time because this is Ford and we
Speaker 1: have to the boss is is different too, so our
Speaker 1: plantation managers of old may have paid terrible wages and
Speaker 1: worked you entirely too hard, but it was the sort
Speaker 1: of paternal system where your boss might also stand as
Speaker 1: its godfather to your children. And the new way is
Speaker 1: very hands off. Ford never visits for Landia, let alone
Speaker 1: the entire country of Brazil, which must have been demoralizing
Speaker 1: to people who weren't used to that kind of management.
Speaker 1: Well and even people even the Michigan managers. That would
Speaker 1: be I think demoralizing if you had moved your whole
Speaker 1: family all the way down to for Landia and you
Speaker 1: your never set split in the country definitely isolating. So
Speaker 1: additional thing. It sounds kind of minor, but just think
Speaker 1: about if if this were your life and you were
Speaker 1: in the Amazon all the time. Entertainment the old way
Speaker 1: would be native dances, native songs, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: The new way, this is my favorite part. We have singalongs,
Speaker 1: poetry reading, mandatory square dancing, which sounds like nightmare. And
Speaker 1: just just as a note, I mean, this is the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, so square dancing isn't really
Speaker 1: the North American norm. I know, it sounds like a
Speaker 1: long time ago. But Ford likes this old fashioned style
Speaker 1: of dancing. He likes polkas that sort of thing, not
Speaker 1: in doing the Charleston. Yeah, and he's not into the
Speaker 1: sexier dances that are sweeping the nation. And again Charles
Speaker 1: Morrow Wilson writes and Harper's the Natives did not choose
Speaker 1: to square dance on the village Green, or to sing
Speaker 1: the quaint folks of Merry, England, or to treasure long fellow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You can imagine if you've just worked at six to
Speaker 1: three shift, maybe the last thing you would want to
Speaker 1: do is listen to some long fellow on the village green,
Speaker 1: and I think you would have to force the people
Speaker 1: to square dance because they don't know why you would
Speaker 1: want to otherwise. Another entertainment issue. Remember that these are
Speaker 1: model communities, so there will be no drinking, and no
Speaker 1: one really pays attention to that one. The native workers
Speaker 1: immediately buy their stuff from river boats that come up
Speaker 1: on pay day, and according to Grandon, the white linen
Speaker 1: suit guys who are trusted to go gather seeds from
Speaker 1: the jungle would actually binge on alcohol and get so
Speaker 1: wasted that they would start baptizing farm animals with perfume.
Speaker 1: Or maybe they just had too much fun square dancing.
Speaker 1: I don't know. But the most problematic is with food.
Speaker 1: The old way, of course, was eating traditional foods with
Speaker 1: traditional service, and and Forward's vision everyone eats in a
Speaker 1: mess hall that's incredibly hot inside and only serves Detroit
Speaker 1: food wheat bread, oatmeal, and canned Michigan peaches, which is
Speaker 1: as Georgians come on and Michigan peaches um. The visiting
Speaker 1: writer Charles Morrow Wilson again writes a workman's mess hall
Speaker 1: was set up, but native workers did not like the
Speaker 1: wholesome Detroit style cooking. And complained bitterly of indigestion. North
Speaker 1: American Fair in the jungle no more pleases the customers
Speaker 1: than a quick change to Amazon Fair would please you
Speaker 1: or me. So the major problem, though, with the whole
Speaker 1: food scene is when they cut weight or service to
Speaker 1: save money and make the whole dining hall cafeteria style
Speaker 1: and a buffet. Yeah, and so the workers, for one thing,
Speaker 1: aren't used to cafeteria style food. Um, they're not used
Speaker 1: to waiting in line. Again, you're working in the sun
Speaker 1: all day and then you have to stand in line
Speaker 1: for your lunch. And the result of this change is
Speaker 1: a riot. We have one worker saying I'm a worker,
Speaker 1: not a waiter, and workers ransacked the dining hall. They
Speaker 1: drive trucks into the river. They smash windows and wreck
Speaker 1: the sawmill and the radio station and the time clock.
Speaker 1: Of course, some yeah and American managers are panicking. They
Speaker 1: some seat cover in the jungle, or some go out
Speaker 1: onto a boat that's tied up and just waited out.
Speaker 1: But it's a bad sign. If the change to cafeteria
Speaker 1: style dining sets off a riot, I think you have
Speaker 1: a major problem. Our most damning issue, however, is the
Speaker 1: rubber itself. So our old way of growing rubber and
Speaker 1: harvesting rubber was to gather it from wild trees that
Speaker 1: grew spaced out in clumps, and the space provided some
Speaker 1: protection from pasts, while these clumps provide protection from heat.
Speaker 1: Ford's vision is to plant one point four million trees
Speaker 1: in neat rows, because that's how factory supervisors like things.
Speaker 1: The problem is that when you do that, it attracts
Speaker 1: leaf blight, fungi, and pests like caterpillars less leaving the
Speaker 1: trees completely exposed to the elements. So the rubber production,
Speaker 1: which is the whole mission of this is completely ridiculous.
Speaker 1: It does not work at all, and even if they've
Speaker 1: been smarter about cultivating the rubber, the terrain of ford
Speaker 1: Land is terrible, as is the climate. The soil erodes.
Speaker 1: It's incredibly hot and humid, which is too much for
Speaker 1: our Michigan managers. When it rains, the water collects in
Speaker 1: low spots, which leads to epidemics of malaria. And when
Speaker 1: it doesn't rain, we have a dry season from July
Speaker 1: to November where the waters of the river drop up
Speaker 1: to forty feet and the boats can't come in, and
Speaker 1: it's not just the mosquitoes. We've also got ants and
Speaker 1: moths plaguing our people, and we have violence too, so
Speaker 1: this isn't just a bad camp scenario. We have things
Speaker 1: like knife fights going on, especially in the early days,
Speaker 1: but also later with a cafeteria riot and a protest
Speaker 1: over the employment of workers from Barbados who the native
Speaker 1: workers were upset that these imported workers were getting higher wages.
Speaker 1: So Ford finally realizes that he picked the wrong spot.
Speaker 1: He admits defeat. Yeah, this whole thing. He kind of
Speaker 1: doesn't admit defeat though, because in nineteen thirty four he
Speaker 1: trades part of his original concession for seven hundred three thousand,
Speaker 1: seven hundred fifty acres to the north and sets up
Speaker 1: yet another model town, which is going to be an
Speaker 1: improved version of Fordlandia called bell Terra. I hope there's
Speaker 1: not quite so much square dancing, so there are some improvements,
Speaker 1: like a manager who makes square dancing optional and some
Speaker 1: lessons learned. Ford is willing to erect a Catholic church immediately,
Speaker 1: which is something he was opposed to doing in Fordlandia.
Speaker 1: And we've got doctors who are working to eradicate malaria
Speaker 1: with quinine, but This is still no dream city, and
Speaker 1: certainly not for Ford. When our Amazon workers unionize in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine, seriously, I mean I was kind of
Speaker 1: blown away by that fact, unionizing the Amazon workers in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine. But unlike for Landia, we actually do
Speaker 1: get some crops out of Belterra. Amazing They're pretty pitiful, though.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty two there's a crop yield of seven
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty tons of latex, which are from Asian
Speaker 1: tree graphs, which are less susceptible to all these pests.
Speaker 1: And Ford had hoped though, for thirty eight thousand tons annually,
Speaker 1: so clearly we're falling far short of that goal. Harvests
Speaker 1: of other crops like eucalyptus, teak and balsa are also
Speaker 1: small due to strict regulations of timber exports, and some
Speaker 1: are used to trim Ford Lincoln's. So that's a little momentum,
Speaker 1: I guess from bel Terra for anyone who has one
Speaker 1: of those, But they they have a few other random
Speaker 1: things to cinnamon, ginger, coffee, tea. Still nothing much comes
Speaker 1: from it. Belterra is not a particularly productive town and
Speaker 1: the war World War two is really hard on the
Speaker 1: city because German subs actually stop supply ships from reaching
Speaker 1: the city. So you can imagine suddenly you're relying on
Speaker 1: your little gardens, and it would be tough times without
Speaker 1: your Michigan tin peaches. It's finally all over by nineteen
Speaker 1: In December of that year, officials at the Ford Motor
Speaker 1: Company announced, our war experience has taught us that synthetic
Speaker 1: rubber is superior to natural rubber for certain of our products,
Speaker 1: and they would return the concession to Brazil for two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand dollars and that's it. So it
Speaker 1: makes us wonder how much did this whole thing cost.
Speaker 1: It hask to have been a fortune, and it it was.
Speaker 1: Ford Motor Company says that it cost about twenty million
Speaker 1: in but then a few years later documents came out
Speaker 1: that showed it was more like twenty five million. Some
Speaker 1: historians put it as much as thirty million, so clearly
Speaker 1: a huge waste of money. So it may have been
Speaker 1: a waste of money, but at least we've got some
Speaker 1: cool ghost towns out of it. They're still there today.
Speaker 1: It'll take you about eighteen hours on a riverboat to
Speaker 1: get there, but you can look up some pictures and
Speaker 1: Google images. They're pretty spooky. And I think there's spent
Speaker 1: some talk about reviving Belterra, but not so much for
Speaker 1: land is a lost cause still apparently no. I know.
Speaker 1: I promised that Sarah might sing a song at the
Speaker 1: end of this podcast, but she's actually losing her voice.
Speaker 1: So instead we're going to recite what we think would
Speaker 1: make a lovely introduction to the Ford Landy of musical
Speaker 1: that you're going to write for us. We'll try to
Speaker 1: be emphatic about it. There are you ready? I'm ready?
Speaker 1: Okay for Landia, Fordlandia, each your oats and don't die
Speaker 1: in the malaria. And that is our final word on Fordlandia.
Speaker 1: And that brings us to listener mail. Our email today
Speaker 1: is from listener Marcella, who wrote about our Madhari podcast,
Speaker 1: and she said, my great grand uncle was a reasonably
Speaker 1: famous Guatemalan writer at the turn of the twentieth century.
Speaker 1: His name was Enrique Gomez Carrio and he was the
Speaker 1: Guatemalan consul in Paris from onwards. He was a notorious womanizer,
Speaker 1: and family legend has it that one of his various
Speaker 1: lovers was Matahari herself. He wrote a book about her,
Speaker 1: and while whether he was involved with Matahari or not
Speaker 1: is on the level of speculation, he was accused of
Speaker 1: being responsible for bringing her to the French authorities and
Speaker 1: deceiving her into returning to Paris, where the French detained her,
Speaker 1: and in fact, the book he wrote about her was
Speaker 1: supposed to be Enrique's attempt to disassociate himself with the
Speaker 1: whole case. Enrique's last wife was also somewhat well known,
Speaker 1: Consuelos Succin to Santa Supuri, later life of Antoine de
Speaker 1: Santi Superi, who of course is the author of The
Speaker 1: Little Prince. So thanks for writing to us, Marcella. I
Speaker 1: think she also mentioned he's buried in Paras, which is
Speaker 1: where Oscar Wilde of course ended up. And if you
Speaker 1: have any cool family stories to send us where at
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