Read Online Fordlandia by Greg Grandin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Greg Grandin
Tags: United States, General, History, Biography & Autobiography, 20th Century, South America, Latin America, Political Science, Business & Economics, Business, Brazil, Industries, Corporate & Business History, Fordlândia (Brazil), Automobile Industry, Ford, Rubber plantations - Brazil - Fordlandia - History - 20th century, Fordlandia, Fordlandia (Brazil) - History, Rubber plantations, Planned communities - Brazil - History - 20th century, Planned communities, Brazil - Civilization - American influences - History - 20th century, Henry - Political and social views
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for instance, or Oxholm—could double for Kurtz, defying the “whited sepulchre” of Dearborn puritanism and giving in to their lusts.
Yet there’s something more Mark Twain than Joseph Conrad, more Huckleberry than homicidal, about the stories of Ford men lost in the wilderness. Consider Mr. Johansen, a Scot, and Mr. Tolksdorf, a German, dispatched to gather rubber seeds in September 1929 by Ford’s envoy William Cowling. Their mission was urgent. After the disaster of Captain Oxholm’s first planting, the two men were charged with locating groves of high-yielding rubber trees, gathering their seeds, and returning in time to plant them by the coming May, before the rains ended. Traveling with a Brazilian assistant named Victor Gil and a “Negro cook” named Francisco, the two Europeans cut loose their Brazilian underlings a month into the trip. Gil they abandoned in a two-hut village, and Francisco they put ashore on an uninhabited island. 1
Johansen and Tolksdorf headed to Barra, a small rubber town at the headwaters of the Tapajós. With the idea that it would be “nice to have a highball or two” on the coming New Year’s Eve, they ordered wine, whiskey, and beer and paid for it with company funds. They proceeded to get “intoxicated and remained that way most of the time throwing money away and making fools of themselves in general.” One night, Johansen stumbled into a trading post, where he purchased several bottles of perfume. He then headed back out to the town’s one street, swerving back and forth as he chased down cows, goats, sheep, pigs, and chickens. Baptizing the livestock with the perfume, he repeated the benediction “Mr. Ford has lots of money; you might as well smell good too.”
After about a week, the two renegades contracted a launch, loaded it with Ford-bought whiskey and a prostitute they hired as a cook, and set off on what sounded more like a “vagabond picnic than a rubber seed gathering expedition.” They continued their riverine ribaldry from village to village, one smaller than the next, until they landed in a government area set aside for the Mundurucú Indians, centered on a Catholic Franciscan mission. There Johansen established himself as the “rubber seed king of the upper rivers,” using a crew of about forty Indians to clear underbrush and gather seeds.
FORD MANAGERS, LIKE European colonialists in Asia and Africa, were fixated on race. Ernest Liebold, after all, advised Ford to plant rubber in Brazil and not in Liberia largely because of his low opinion of Africans. “She has just a touch of the ‘tar-brush,’ ” wrote O. Z. Ide in his diary after meeting the Brazilian wife of a Belém-based British exporter. Others who followed Ide used the words nigger and negroes freely and, according to historian Elizabeth Esch, plotted workers by skin color on a spectrum that ranged from “tameness” to “savagery.” When Archibald Johnston, who would shortly become Fordlandia’s manager, wanted to send Henry Ford and other company executives some samples of rain forest wood, he had a “little wooden nigger boy” made from different specimens of trees found on the estate. Johnston said in a note accompanying the gift that its color was “all natural.” Its cap, coat, teeth, and collar were made of pau marfim, a dense, cream-colored wood. Its head was carved from pau santo, a kind of tonewood. And the buttons were pau amarelo, or yellowheart. Ford’s secretary thanked Johnston for the “nigger boy,” saying that his boss was “very pleased” with the gift. “It is indeed a fine piece of work,” Sorensen replied directly. 2
Yet instead of unleashing the kind of mortal racism that gripped Kurtz, the jungle seemed to catalyze in Ford men another trait endemic to Americans: a blithe insistence that all the world is more or less like us, or at least an imagined version of “us.” Here is the sawyer Matt Mulrooney commenting on workers, many of whom in the
Yet there’s something more Mark Twain than Joseph Conrad, more Huckleberry than homicidal, about the stories of Ford men lost in the wilderness. Consider Mr. Johansen, a Scot, and Mr. Tolksdorf, a German, dispatched to gather rubber seeds in September 1929 by Ford’s envoy William Cowling. Their mission was urgent. After the disaster of Captain Oxholm’s first planting, the two men were charged with locating groves of high-yielding rubber trees, gathering their seeds, and returning in time to plant them by the coming May, before the rains ended. Traveling with a Brazilian assistant named Victor Gil and a “Negro cook” named Francisco, the two Europeans cut loose their Brazilian underlings a month into the trip. Gil they abandoned in a two-hut village, and Francisco they put ashore on an uninhabited island. 1
Johansen and Tolksdorf headed to Barra, a small rubber town at the headwaters of the Tapajós. With the idea that it would be “nice to have a highball or two” on the coming New Year’s Eve, they ordered wine, whiskey, and beer and paid for it with company funds. They proceeded to get “intoxicated and remained that way most of the time throwing money away and making fools of themselves in general.” One night, Johansen stumbled into a trading post, where he purchased several bottles of perfume. He then headed back out to the town’s one street, swerving back and forth as he chased down cows, goats, sheep, pigs, and chickens. Baptizing the livestock with the perfume, he repeated the benediction “Mr. Ford has lots of money; you might as well smell good too.”
After about a week, the two renegades contracted a launch, loaded it with Ford-bought whiskey and a prostitute they hired as a cook, and set off on what sounded more like a “vagabond picnic than a rubber seed gathering expedition.” They continued their riverine ribaldry from village to village, one smaller than the next, until they landed in a government area set aside for the Mundurucú Indians, centered on a Catholic Franciscan mission. There Johansen established himself as the “rubber seed king of the upper rivers,” using a crew of about forty Indians to clear underbrush and gather seeds.
FORD MANAGERS, LIKE European colonialists in Asia and Africa, were fixated on race. Ernest Liebold, after all, advised Ford to plant rubber in Brazil and not in Liberia largely because of his low opinion of Africans. “She has just a touch of the ‘tar-brush,’ ” wrote O. Z. Ide in his diary after meeting the Brazilian wife of a Belém-based British exporter. Others who followed Ide used the words nigger and negroes freely and, according to historian Elizabeth Esch, plotted workers by skin color on a spectrum that ranged from “tameness” to “savagery.” When Archibald Johnston, who would shortly become Fordlandia’s manager, wanted to send Henry Ford and other company executives some samples of rain forest wood, he had a “little wooden nigger boy” made from different specimens of trees found on the estate. Johnston said in a note accompanying the gift that its color was “all natural.” Its cap, coat, teeth, and collar were made of pau marfim, a dense, cream-colored wood. Its head was carved from pau santo, a kind of tonewood. And the buttons were pau amarelo, or yellowheart. Ford’s secretary thanked Johnston for the “nigger boy,” saying that his boss was “very pleased” with the gift. “It is indeed a fine piece of work,” Sorensen replied directly. 2
Yet instead of unleashing the kind of mortal racism that gripped Kurtz, the jungle seemed to catalyze in Ford men another trait endemic to Americans: a blithe insistence that all the world is more or less like us, or at least an imagined version of “us.” Here is the sawyer Matt Mulrooney commenting on workers, many of whom in the
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