AaeFordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry FordAAEs Forgotten Jungle CityAAE, by Greg Grandin.

Reviewed by Tim Rutten

From the moment restive medieval scribes began to jot their own thoughts and feelings into the spaces alongside the texts and chronicles theyAAEd been assigned to copy, much thatAAEs most fascinating about Western history has seemed, at first, simply marginalia. Historian Greg Grandin has taken what heretofore seemed just such a marginal eventAuHenry FordAAEs failed attempt to establish a gigantic agricultural industrial complex in the heart of BrazilAAEs Amazon BasinAuand turned it into a fascinating historical narrative that illuminates the auto industryAAEs contemporary crisis, the problems of globalization and the contradictions of contemporary consumerism. For all that, this is not, however, history freighted with political pedantry. Grandin is one of a blessedly expanding group of gifted American historians who assume that whatever moral the story of the past may yield, it must be a story well told. AoFordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry FordAAEs Forgotten Jungle CityAo is precisely thatAua genuinely readable history recounted with a novelistAAEs sense of pace and an eye for character. ItAAEs a significant contribution to our understanding of ourselves and engrossingly enjoyable. In 1927, Ford was AmericaAAEs richest man and (in most AorespectableAo circles) one of its most admired. He was also in a protean sense our first industrial celebrity, forerunner of such figures as David Packard, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who would be celebrated for organizing transforming technologies. The assembly line obviously was FordAAEs greatest innovation, and the affordable personal auto its great transforming product, but his ambitions hardly stopped there. Social reformers who visited FordAAEs first auto plants were horrified by what they saw. The British journalist Julian Street called the Model T assembly line in Highland Park, Mich., Aoa relentless systemAo producing Aoterrible efficiency. ... Like a river and its tributaries.Ao Ford saw other problemsAuhigh absenteeism and worker turnover. Later that year, Grandin writes, AoFord made an announcement that sent seismic shocks across the globe. ... (T)he Ford Motor Company would pay an incentive wage of $5 for an eight-hour day, nearly double the average industrial standard. The Wall Street Journal charged Henry Ford with class treason, with Aaeeconomic blunders if not crimesAAE. Yet his absentee and turnover rate plummeted and Ford was jolted into the ranks of the worldAAEs most admired men, Aaean international symbol of the new industrialismAAE.Ao Ford followed up the raise with a system of educational, health and other benefits and set up a vast network of spies and home visitors to ensure the new wages were spent on Aoa wholesome lifeAo rather than on Aogambling, drinking or whoringAo. Workers were prodded into spending on houses, washing machines, vacuum cleaners and, of course, Ford cars. The mogul and the cadre of farsighted executives around him Aounderstood that high wages and decent benefits would do more than create a dependable and thus more productive workforce; they would also stabilize and stimulate demand for industrial products by turning workers into consumersAo. Thus was born AoFordismAo, which many at the time embraced as a kind of Aothird wayAo between unrestrained capitalism and Marxism. Ford and his astonishinglyAuindeed, tragicallyAucontradictory character stands at the center of AoFordlandiaAo. Grandin has, in essence, given us a bracing new angle on this strange manAAEs biography. He was a lifelong admirer of Emerson, firm in the AoTranscendentalistsAAE belief in human perfectibilityAo, yet he instinctively distrusted every individualAAEs choice but his ownAuand more so as the years went on. He was a pacifist and opponent of capital punishment who ultimately unleashed brutal thugs to terrorize his own workers. He so loathed the farm life of his boyhood that he thought cowAAEs milk should be replaced by soy and wool by linen, but went around founding utopian communities that mixed farming and industry. He was a bitter, vulgar, lifelong anti-Semite. Ford was, in other words, perhaps the greatest example of a peculiarly American type in which the line between crank and genius is so ephemeral as to be all but invisible. Grandin has said he was drawn to the story of Fordlandia because it Aocaptures the essence of Ford, tying together all the many threads of his lifeAo. By the late 1920s, Ford was feeling many kinds of pressure: Socially, America was closing in on him. The long boom was tottering toward the abyss of 1929; his various social experiments were increasingly rejected, including a plan that in many respects anticipated the Tennessee Valley Authority; at the same time, an Anglo-Dutch attempt to monopolize the production of rubber in Southeast Asia seemed to directly threaten Ford MotorAAEs future. The Southeast Asian plantations were founded with seeds stolen from the Brazilian rain forest, where rubber trees grew wild. Thus, Ford was persuaded to put up $125,000 to acquire 2.5 million acres along an Amazon tributary 500 miles from the Atlantic. There he envisioned a vast plantation in which carefully selected seedlings would be raised scientifically and the latex harvested by local workers under the supervision of American executives. Ford decreed the construction of a village with Cape Cod-style bungalows, a state-of-the-art hospital, company cafeterias, schools, a cinema with American films andAubelieve it or notAunightly square dancing. The local workers, who previously had lived in a kind of debt peonage, were to be paid US wages. Good intentions notwithstanding, it was a disaster from the start. Ford was a supporter of Prohibition and insisted that his workers refrain from alcohol and smoking, which didnAAEt fly with anybody in the rain forest. A floating red-light district soon emerged, and the company hospital did brisk business treating venereal diseases. Most of all, consumerism failed, because there was nothing to buy. Ford compensated by opening subsidized shoe stores and ice cream parlors. But concentrating the rubber trees in plantations had made them more prone to the pests indigenous to the rain forest. Production never amounted to much. In 1930, the most serious of a series of riots erupted with chants of Aokill all the AmericansAo after a manager did away with cafeteria table service and made workers line up for alien brown rice and whole wheat bread, which Ford deemed healthy. Ford never visited Fordlandia, but he poured money into it and another nearby village, perhaps imagining that projects his fellow Americans had rejected might come to fruition there. By the time Ford Motor sold Fordlandia back to the Brazilian government in 1945 for $244,200, the company had spent, in inflation-adjusted figures, roughly $1 billion on the project. LATWP News Servic

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