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In 1927, Henry Ford, vast in
determination, ingenuity,
and protuberant opinion, and
increasingly contradictory
in his fantasies, moved
forward with his plans for a
settlement in Brazil's
Amazonian jungle, soon known
as Fordlandia. Initially
inspired by the carmaker's
alarm over a proposed
British and Dutch rubber
cartel, the project was an
experiment in applying the
principles of mass
production to agriculture,
specifically rubber plants
and their tapping. But it
was also an attempt to
create a "great industrial
city" in which a harmony of
mechanization and nature
would give rise to a better
and, as Ford firmly
believed, Emersonian way of
life. Ford's distaste for
expertise and precedent led
him to ignore the experience
of companies that had
successfully exploited the
tropics. He was swindled and
misled in the land deal and
pushed his own views on
everything, imposing
industrial regimentation and
American ideas of a decent
life -- punctuality, indoor
plumbing, canned peaches,
square dancing, and the like
-- upon a pre-industrial
people. The result was a
failure with many
installments, but it paled
before the fiasco of
attempting to subdue the
gigantically vital,
implacable jungle with its
legion of parasites. Growing
rubber trees according to
Dearborn, Michigan's,
notions of efficiency was
never achieved, and the
effort was made all the more
futile by tumbling rubber
prices. In a sense the
entire enterprise was a
sideshow, darkly comic at
times, in the progress of
global capitalism; but under
Grandin's complex scrutiny
and eye for character, it
also provides a
multifaceted, if ghoulishly
lighted, spectacle of Henry
Ford's preoccupations and
disenchantment with America
as it had come to be in the
1920s and 1930s.
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Greg Grandin
is the author of Empire’s
Workshop, The Last
Colonial Massacre, and
the award-winning The
Blood of Guatemala. An
associate professor of Latin
American history at New York
University, and a Guggenheim
fellow, Grandin has served
on the United Nations Truth
Commission investigating the
Guatemalan Civil War and has
written for the Los
Angeles Times, The
Nation, The New
Statesman, and The
New York Times.
2009
Awards
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