Henry Ford's folly

Of all the struggles of will and power in the years leading to America's hegemony after World War II, the least well-known may be the battle between Henry Ford and the Amazon that began in 1928. So much was at stake - the prospect of new sources of rubber, essential for the new industrialization and later for the war effort; the reputation of one of America's most romantic and most practical men; and the notion that the American way of life, with its accompanying pastimes, architecture, and values, was transferable to venues far away and cultures far different.

Ford's is a great success story, the tale of how a man and a dream transformed ways of life, work, and leisure for a nation at the very moment it was poised for greatness. He built cars, a consumer culture, and a style of living, and in doing so may have been the most influential man, or the most American figure, of his time and place. But he couldn't plant a Michigan farm town in the middle of the Amazon; he couldn't wrestle rubber out of Brazil; and he couldn't make Latin America an outpost of Americanism.

"Fordlandia" is the story of one of the great industrialist's signal failures, and it is a story of his signature vision and values. As such, it is a chronicle of arrogance and broken dreams, which is not exactly how we think of Ford and, perhaps more poignant, not the way he regarded himself. But Greg Grandin, who teaches Latin American history at New York University, tells a gripping story of high hopes and deep failure, a saga that in some ways is a morality tale for the American century, when scores of efforts to plant our values and harvest foreign dollars brought disappointment, sometimes even despair.

Grandin calls Ford's adventure in the Amazon his "easy-chair Arcadia," but in truth there was nothing easy about it. Along with the high ambitions came disease, violence, waste, rivalries, and, perhaps worst of all, fungi, bugs, and blight. The latter made Ford's dreams a wasteland.

Ford was defeated in the Amazon wilds but - and here author Joseph Conrad seems a constant companion - the disaster resulted more from human flaws than animal and plant pests, from character rather than geography. By assembling an American colony and peddling what Grandin characterizes as "clapboard simplicity," Ford sowed his own destruction in soil where almost everything grows but in a climate that choked off American values.

"Fordlandia became more and more a museum piece," Grandin writes, "Ford's vision of Americanism frozen in amber."

Ironies abound, of course. But one of the greatest is this: Ford's entire ethos was a marriage of a romantic pastoral past and the creation of a blunt industrial future. Both could not exist side by side, except in Ford's own mind, and the war for Amazonia was ultimately a battle over these conflicting pinions of the man's deeply flawed world view.

In so many facets of his life, Ford celebrated the factory but revered the garden. His methods and manufacturing plans built a new world even as they destroyed the old world. This is in essence what happened with his appointment in Amazonia.

"The main struts of Henry Ford's philosophy all had antecedents in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American political and literary concepts: that mechanization marked not the conquest but the realization of nature's secrets and thus the attainment of the pastoral ideal; that history is best understood as the progress of this realization, of the gradual liberation of humans from soul-crushing toil; and that America has a providential role to play in world history in achieving this liberation." This turned out to be, to use one of Ford's most famous words, bunk.

The reasons Ford needed the Amazon, and rubber, were simple: tires, hoses, gaskets, electrical wire. The reason he failed was equally simple: parochialism. He and his agents, for example, planted homes for his workers that were appropriate for the American Midwest but utterly unsuited for the Brazilian interior; the asbestos-lined roofs kept the heat in rather than out. The oatmeal and canned peaches from Michigan were not exactly a big hit either. These mistakes, multiplied a hundredfold, were his undoing.

But nothing undid Ford and Fordlandia more than a simple error of omission: not asking for native agricultural advice.

"From Fordlandia's inception, it was assumed that the company that had perfected mass industrial production would grow plantation rubber," Grandin writes. "Observers of Ford noticed that he treated machines as 'living things,' so in the Amazon it was to be expected that his men would treat living things - rubber trees - as machines."

Ford workers planted trees close together, not realizing that rubber trees flourish when there is a great distance among them, preventing insects and disease from moving from one to the other. The result was the creation of what Grandin calls "a bridge over which South American leaf blight could march." That was before the invasion of caterpillars.

The result was disaster and defeat. In the end, Ford invested millions in the Amazon and reaped almost nothing. By 1945, Henry Ford II gave up and handed the company's two Amazon communities, covering a land mass about the size of Connecticut, over to the Brazilian government for $244,200. More than a dozen years earlier, The Washington Post noted that Ford "not only intends to cultivate rubber but the rubber gatherers as well." He failed, utterly and tragically, at both.

David M. Shribman, for a decade the Globe's Washington bureau chief, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.