Table of contents:
- Grand plans
- Car boom
- Henry Ford had a firm vision of what a utopia should be
- The decline of Fordlandia
- Ghost town
Video: How Henry Ford Wanted to Conquer the Amazon Jungle: The 20th Century's Most Ambitious Failed Project
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
This picture was taken in 1934 in the remote jungle of the Brazilian Amazon. In the photo, the workers of Henry Ford - the famous American industrialist, one of the pioneers of the automotive industry. Ford dreamed of building a dream city here. To create a kind of utopian society, a social experiment. Why was the businessman's plans not destined to come true, and only ruins in the jungle remained of the dream?
Grand plans
Henry Ford was a very controversial person. The industrialist was a talented businessman, he had a very progressive outlook where it came to work. In terms of racial ideology, he was a staunch conservative. Simply put, a racist. This uniquely brilliant man revolutionized the automotive industry and invented the 40-hour work week. At the same time, in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent, he actively spoke out against Jews.
In 1928, an American industrialist launched a large-scale operation. In doing so, he pursued several goals. Ford wanted to break free of the Asian rubber importers' stranglehold on his business. He chose a location on the banks of the Tapajos River. Henry Ford recruited locals and razed vast tracts of the Amazon jungle to create a rubber plantation.
Ford's plans were much more ambitious, they went far beyond a simple plantation. He wanted to build an experimental utopian society that was to become a new word in business and civilization. Sadly, Ford was just a businessman. By the time this photo was taken, his dream was already crumbling.
Car boom
When the internal combustion engine and pneumatic tires were invented in the late 19th century, horseless carriages finally became a reality. Despite this, for many years the car remained the property of the rich and privileged. Common workers and the middle class continued to use horses, trains, and their legs to get around.
Henry Ford was the man who changed everything. In 1908, he created and launched the Ford Model T, which became the first affordable car for everyone. Its price was only $ 260 ($ 3835 in modern money). Over two decades, more than 15 million of these machines have been sold. Every car was heavily dependent on various rubber parts: tires, hoses, and more.
Until 1912, rubber production in the Amazon experienced a real boom. Then a certain Englishman, Henry Wickham, began to supply rubber seeds to the British colonies in India. Already in 1922, 75% of all rubber in the world was produced there. Great Britain decided that this was not enough and they adopted the "Stevenson Plan". According to him, the tonnage of exported rubber was strictly limited, and prices soared to unimaginable heights.
This did not suit either Henry Ford or the American industry in general. In 1925, Herbert Hoover, then US Secretary of Commerce, declared that the Stevenson Plan, with its inflated rubber prices, "threatened the American way of life." There have been attempts to launch the production of inexpensive rubber in the States. They all failed in the end. At this very time, Henry Ford began to think about his own rubber plantation. The industrialist hoped to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, he wanted to reduce production costs as much as possible. On the other hand, to demonstrate that his industrial ideals will work anywhere in the world.
Henry Ford had a firm vision of what a utopia should be
Henry Ford built a city in the Amazon jungle for ten thousand people. He knew exactly what a utopia should be like. The industrialist imagined that he could impose American customs and assembly lines on people from a completely different culture. Welcome to Fordlandia, one of the most ambitious failed projects of the past century.
Being a typical American meant eating American food, living in American-style houses, attending poetry evenings, and listening to songs in English only. Ford mercilessly imposed his idealistic ideas on local workers. Unfamiliar and unfamiliar food, a new way of life. The Brazilians were not ready for this. On the territory of the dream city, there was a dry law, a ban on tobacco and … women! Even families were forbidden to live. All these simple human pleasures Fordlandians increasingly sought in a neighboring settlement. They jokingly called it "The Island of Innocence." It was full of bars, nightclubs and brothels.
The decline of Fordlandia
As is often seen from history, arrogance is the most common sign of impending disaster. Ford did not like experts, did not consider it necessary to turn to someone's services. The brilliant businessman did not expect failure at all. It would seem that detailed plans, the successful implementation of Fordlandia, the company's social policy in relation to employees and high wages for the area, made the project doomed to success. But, from the very beginning, everything went wrong. The human factor worked.
At first, the manager that Ford sent to his dream city made a lot of mistakes. He did not understand the issue at all. As an excellent manager, he didn’t understand a bit about how to plant rubber trees. Because of this, he placed them too close together. Plants began to hurt, they were pestered by all kinds of pests.
After the change of manager, things got even worse. In an effort to cut costs, workers were cut wages. This turned out to be the last straw that overflowed the cup of patience. An imposed alien culture, a strict life schedule, a tight work schedule … The culmination of the collapse was the uprising that was raised by the workers of Fordland in 1930. It was possible to suppress it only when the Brazilian army intervened.
As a result of all this, Fordlandia quickly turned into an abandoned ghost town. The landscape was soon swallowed up by the jungle, and some of the buildings became part of the nearby city. Ford's dream has become a waste of money, natural resources and human energy. Almost $ 20 million was invested in the project, and Ford did not wait for the planned volume of rubber. The trees rotted away, the city was abandoned. Fifteen years later, Henry Ford's grandson lost almost his entire $ 20 million investment in the sale of a loss-making abandoned business to the Brazilian government.
Ghost town
Fordlandia was built with an eye on a long-term productive existence. All the comforts of a modern American city were there. In addition to a full-fledged hospital, hotel, large power plant, and so on, there was even a golf course. Now all this has turned into a huge monument of failure and crushing defeat. Today these concrete structures are loved by extreme tourists in order to take impressive selfies against their background.
After a string of failures, Ford tried to transfer production to a facility just upriver. But much success was never achieved. In 1945, the synthetic rubber industry changed everything.
The strangest thing in this whole story with Fordland was that Ford himself never visited his brainchild. An unsuccessful experiment with an industrial utopia later served as a model for modern dystopias. The writer Aldous Huxley, for example, was inspired by Fordland when he wrote Brave New World. The heroes of this novel even celebrate Ford Day. There was a time when Henry Ford was a brilliant businessman, he was considered a visionary. Unfortunately, now almost everything that he created is in desolation. One former resident of Fordland told reporters in 2017: "Turns out Detroit is not the only place that Ford has turned into ruins." The sad end of a glittering empire.
Read about another unsuccessful social experiment, this time in the vastness of the USSR, in our other article. why there were no days off in the Soviet Union for 11 years.
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