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By Mary A. Dempsey
Deep
ruts cleaved the road and I bounced high in the passenger seat of the
pickup, fingers of sweat running down my back. But I drew a delighted
breath when we turned onto a long, cool lane lined with magnificent
old mango trees. White wicker chairs rested on the porches of
clapboard houses where dark green shutters blocked the baking sun.
Tidy lawns exploded with flowers; a handful of pines lent aromatic
shade. Fire hydrants stamped by a Michigan manufacturer poked up at
intervals from the concrete sidewalks.
The
bucolic setting harkened to northern Michigan of the 1930s, but this
was Brazil’s Amazon rainforest in the 1990s. I had reached Belterra,
the spot once described as “Dearborn in the Jungle.” A former
rubber-workers’ town now owned by the Brazilian government, Belterra
is the vestige of a battle between Yankee ingenuity and Mother
Nature—the remains of Henry Ford’s bid to become a rubber baron.
Gone
were the outdoor movie screens that half a century ago brought
scratchy Hollywood releases to illiterate jungle workers slashing
rubber trees 150 miles south of the equator. No one remembered where
the Belterra Club’s library had been; they did identify a rough
field as the former nine-hole golf course. Model T Fords from Dearborn
once rolled down these streets and, on rare occasions, the hospital
dispatched its ambulance, but the only vehicle we passed in the sleepy
village was a Volkswagen in a carport.
My
guide, Steven Alexander, wheeled his truck behind the Catholic church,
where a road led to the once classy homes of the upper-management
Brazilians who helped run the plantation during the 1930s. Bigger than
the first houses we passed, they boasted expansive yards and few
neighbors. We passed the old hotel, now abandoned, its white paint
peeling. The houses along the dirt road—once capped in
asphalt—grew more secluded as we reached a plateau overlooking the
Tapajos River. “This is where the North American managers lived,”
said Alexander, a U.S. expatriate, "as we hopped from the truck and
stood in the place where the view was best and the breezes coolest."
Henry
Ford never visited Brazil, but he looked to the South American country
to break a British-Dutch rubber monopoly. Already in the early
twentieth century, Harvey Firestone used wild Brazilian rubber for the
tires he shipped to the Ford Rouge plant, where they were slapped on
Model Ts. But the Chicago tire maker was displeased with the quality
of the wild latex. Asia was, at the time, the world’s rubber capital
thanks to plantations started with seeds spirited out of Brazil. In
Asia, where rubber trees flourished because they had no natural pests,
a cartel kept prices high.
Some
say it was the pricing that annoyed Ford; others say it was simply
logic—why import rubber from halfway around the globe if it thrived
in the Americas? While Ford pondered the idea of a plantation in the
Americas, the U.S. government as early as 1923 was surveying
Venezuela, Brazil and Central America to evaluate their potential as
rubber sources. A government report by Carl LaRue, a University of
Michigan botanist, gave high marks to a plot of land in Brazil not far
from where the Tapajos River dumps its clear waters into the chocolate
current of the Amazon. After reading LaRue’s report, Ford approached
Brazilian authorities and found them enthusiastic. They hoped the auto
pioneer would spark another rubber boom like the one that fueled their
economy in the nineteenth century.
In
1927 Detroit attorneys O.Z. Ida and W. L. Reeves Blakely negotiated an
agreement granting the automaker 2.5 million acres deep in the
Brazilian Amazon, police protection and duty-free entry of all Ford
equipment and supplies. In exchange for the free land, the U.S. firm
promised to return nine percent of the operation’s profits to the
local and national governments after twelve years. The pact, signed in
October, marked the first plantation attempt in Brazil. Previously,
only wild rubber was tapped.
In
August 1928 the steamer Lake Ormoc, pulling the barge Lake
LaFarge, left Dearborn. Four months later, it unloaded its first
cargo on a murky, malarial shore of the Tapajos. Motorboats, a steam
shovel, a pile driver, tractors, stump pullers, a locomotive,
ice-making machines and crates of food were hauled from the barge and
ship, along with prefabricated buildings, the components of a
powerhouse taken from the Highland Park plant and a disassembled
sawmill. With the equipment, Ford’s new firm, the Companhia
Industrial do Brasil, was born. And a hilly riverside spot known until
then as Boa Vista—Portuguese for “good view”—was christened
Fordlandia.
Fenced
in by jungle, Fordlandia was transformed into a modern suburb with
rows of snug bungalows fed by power lines running to a diesel
generator. The main street was paved and its residents collected well
water from spigots in front of their homes—except for the U.S. staff
and white-collar Brazilians, who had running water in their homes. The
North Americans splashed in their outdoor swimming pool and the
Brazilians escaped the sun by sliding into another pool designated for
their use. “Villa Brasileira,” as one area of the town was known,
boasted tailors, shops, restaurants and shoemakers to serve the local
workers. The sweet smell of bread wafted from a bakery; the butcher
shop offered beef, pork and chicken at subsidized prices. On paper, it
sounded like a dream.
But
there were problems. Fordlandia’s uneven terrain eroded—making it
costlier and slower to operate tractors—and collected stagnant
water, breeding malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Draining swamps and
covering standing water with a film of kerosene helped, as did the
spraying of DDT but the malaria was a constant nemesis. During the dry
season, from July to November, the river at Fordlandia dropped as much
as forty feet, leaving the dock too low for boats to approach. Humid
temperatures pushing the mercury into the nineties were intolerable
for the transplanted Michiganian managers. Ants, moths, mites and leaf
disease attacked the trees. “LaRue picked the wrong place,” said
Dr. Emerick Szilagyi, a Henry Ford Hospital surgeon who ran the
plantation hospitals from 1942 to 1945.
Even
with 1.4 million trees planted in symmetrical rows, 340 workers
appearing on the regular payroll and students enrolled at three
schools, Fordlandia was a flop. But the auto manufacturer would not
give up. In 1934, the Companhia Industrial do Brasil swapped part of
the concession for 703,750 acres one hundred miles further north along
the Tapajos and a second Ford plantation complex, Belterra, was added
to the jungle map. Although Fordlandia continued operations with a
reduced staff, Ford officials plunged ahead at top speed to set up and
equip Belterra—the plantation charged with correcting the blunders
of its predecessor.
I
traveled two hours of rough roads to reach Belterra from Santarem, the
closest Amazon port city. During the 1930s and 1940s boats and a horse
trail were the only links to the port. My route passed ramshackle palm
huts with dirt floors, patchy fields of black pepper and shoeless
children playing by the road. I gasped in surprise when we reached
Belterra. Sidewalks lined the streets and power lines hung from poles.
Paint peeled from vacant industrial buildings, but the homes were well
kept. Screens—the first I’d seen in four days in the
Amazon—stretched across windows.
Screens
were just one of the Yankee customs transported to Fordlandia and
Belterra. Detroit physician L. S. Fallis, Sr., the first doctor sent from
Henry Ford Hospital to run the Fordlandia medical center, attempted to
eradicate malaria and hookworm among Brazilian seringueiros
(rubber gatherers) by distributing quinine and shoes. The quinine was
accepted but shoes were an unwelcome novelty. It is an exceptional
photo that shows the shirtless seringueiros, machetes in hand,
shod only with floppy rubber-soled sandals; their children went
shoeless. The jungle dwellers also found Fordlandia’s two-family
homes hopelessly hot and ugly and the idea of bathrooms repulsive.
Even today, plumbing is a rarity in the jungle.
At
the same time, Ford’s 6:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. work schedule was
unpopular with plantation employees accustomed to slashing trees
several hours before dawn, then resuming the work at sunset for
piecemeal pay. But the promise of free housing and food, top-notch
health care for the workers and their families, and a salary of
thirty-seven cents a day—double the regular wage—kept the seringueiros
on the job. In fact, there had never been so many new opportunities
for paying jobs in the Amazon, prompting large-scale jungle migration
from Brazil’s north and northeastern provinces. But even the
job-hungry workers had a breaking point.
“I’m
a worker, not a waiter!” a Fordlandia employee reportedly yelled in
the food line one day, sparking the plantation’s most notorious
riot. Workers armed with machetes joined the protest against the
self-serve mid-western cuisine in a country where food traditionally
was served at the table. The seringueiros demolished the
cafeteria as North American officials scrambled to the dock, jumped
into boats and waited in the middle of the river for Brazilian troops
to quell the melee.
Violence
erupted again over workers brought from Barbados. The seringueiros
complained the islanders not only took their jobs, but were paid
higher wages. One payday uprising started with the injury of three
West Indies workers and ended with Ford’s agreement to ban
Barbadians from the concession. Brazilians in Santarem told me many of
the West Indians never made it back to the Caribbean; their
descendants still live in cities along the Amazon.
Generally,
the company-imposed routine met hit-and-miss compliance. Children wore
uniforms to school and workers responded favorably to suggestions they
grow their own vegetables. But most ignored Ford’s no liquor rule
and, on paydays, boats filled with potent cachaca—the local
sugar-can brew—pulled up at the dock. Poetry readings, weekend
dances and English sing-alongs were among the disputed cultural
activities.
“Even
today, there are people who still know some of the traditional
American songs,” said Alexander, who has spent extensive time
interviewing local residents to trace Fordlandia and Belterra’s
history. Yankee customs caught the attention of writer Charles Morrow
Wilson when he visited Fordlandia and Belterra in 1941.
“A
workman’s mess hall was set up but native workers did not like the
wholesome Detroit-style cooking and complained bitterly of
indigestion. North American fare in the jungle no more pleases the
customers than a quick change to Amazon fare would please you or
me,” Wilson wrote in a Harpers magazine article titled “Mr.
Ford in the Jungle.” Furthermore, the natives did not choose to
square dance on the village green or to sing the quaint folk songs of
Merrie England or to treasure Longfellow.”
Former
Kalamazoo sheriff Curtis Pringle, a manager at Belterra, boosted labor
relations when he eased off the Dearborn-style routine and deferred to
local customs, especially when it came to meals and entertainment.
Under Pringle, Belterra buildings did not contain the glass that made
the powerhouse at Fordlandia unbearably hot, and weekend square
dancing was optional. Alexander said Henry Ford balked at building a
Catholic church at Fordlandia—even though Catholicism was the
predominant Christian religion in Brazil. The Catholic chapel was
erected right away at Belterra.
I
peeked in the screen door of a building near the church, which still
is assigned a parish priest, and found white wicker chairs lined
against a sky blue wall in what looked like a reception room.
“That’s the hospital.”
Alexander
said of the long-closed but impeccably maintained facility that once
boasted separate wards for men and women, thirty nurses, a dentist,
three physicians and a pharmacist, who also administered anesthesia
during surgery. “We were the Mayo Clinic of the Amazon,” said
Szilagyi, recalling the facility that gained so much popularity that
wealthy people off the plantation showed up for treatment.
The
Belterra hospital, serving a population of seven thousand at its peak,
was the medical center for the Brazilian Amazon and lured South
American doctors who served internships under the tutelage of
physicians from Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital. Machete wounds were
sewn, pneumonia was treated, babies were delivered and intestinal
parasites were battled at the eighty-bed facility. Doctors received
the latest medical journals from a horseback rider who daily trotted
from Belterra to Santarem to meet the mail boat.
Medical
service or not, death was common. “The average life expectancy of
someone born in the Amazon was forty-five years old,” said Szilagyi.
“They had just about every disease that we did here, except for the
diseases of old age.”
In
keeping with Ford’s cradle-to-grave philosophy on worker treatment,
some of the cargo barges transported coffins from the United States
and funerals were paid for by the company. I spied an abandoned coffin
in Belterra sitting forgotten on a wooden shelf in the yard outside a
workshop. Weathered wooden crosses, many askew or fallen, dotted the
overgrown field that marked the cemetery.
There
was never a rubber harvest at Fordlandia. In 1942 Belterra—where
chemicals were used against leaf blight—produced 750 tons of latex
from disease-resistant Asian tree grafts, but that fell far below the
38,000-ton annual yield the automaker had wanted for its $7 million
Rouge tire plant. There was also cultivation of eucalyptus, teak,
balsa and other exotic woods among the 3.6 million trees on the
Belterra concession. Some wood made its way into Ford Lincolns, for
trim, but wholesale lumbering was marred by the hardness of trees that
broke blades at the sawmill and Brazil’s ban on most wood exports.
Belterra’s cinnamon, ginger, coffee, tea and cacao crops never
produced significant income.
During
World War II, Szilagyi recalled, work began on a military landing
strip at Belterra because of concern that Nazis were eyeing South
America. The U.S. government wanted bases in the region, particularly
if there were attempts to sabotage the Panama Canal. An airstrip at
the Ford concession was expected to discourage German interest in
Brazil, which, although nonaligned, had a large and active Fascist
party. In the months before the construction, plantation-bound ships
were hindered by German subs plying the Brazilian coast. The
concession depended upon hydroplane shipments from Belem and the
plantation’s six-month food surplus. “In 1943, we cleared an area
and preparations were made to establish an airfield,” said Szilagyi.
The airfield plan was abandoned when Brazil joined the Allies. A few
years later Belterra and Fordlandia, too, would be abandoned.
The
initial years at Fordlandia were marked by labor problems, cost
overruns and a troubling turnover of North American managers; the
plantation manager changed hands four times from 1928 to 1930. Some
researchers claim the rubber plantation failed because it was guided
by factory-trained supervisors instead of horticulturists. Planting
Fordlandia and Belterra trees in orderly rows, rather than in clumps,
as they grew in the wild, left the trees vulnerable to mites and
robbed them of protection from the hard rains and baking sun.
In
his journal, botanist LaRue wrote that Ford was irked by $125,000 in
bribes paid during negotiations for the concession. But the bribes
were all that Brazilian officials received, because the plantations
never turned a profit. In December 1945, a financially ailing Ford
cited competition from synthetic rubber in announcing it would sell
the concession back to Brazil for a token $250,000.
“Our
war experience has taught us that synthetic rubber is superior to
natural rubber for certain of our products,” declared a Ford press
release. The statement described the rubber plantations as a $20
million investment, but some historians say the company may have
pumped in as much as $30 million before abandoning the project.
Today,
the discarded plantations present a thorny problem. Their remote
locations deep in the jungle render them hard to utilize, yet their
solidly built structures, workshops, roads and electrical lines leave
them shameful to abandon. The clusters of workshops and homes, far
from cities and public services, now tenaciously cling to existence.
“It’s
a white elephant for the government,” said Alexander, explaining
that the federal government assumed the Companhia Industrial do Brasil
payroll and even today pays a team of workers to maintain the
buildings while it tries to convince the municipality to take over the
complex. “But the municipality doesn’t want the responsibility of
the payroll.”
Rubber
groves at both complexes fall under the authority of Brazil’s
Ministry of Agriculture, but the trees no longer are tapped. A
research station for experimental plantings, including the grafting of
oranges, is based at Belterra and there is talk of moving the
government’s wood-technology center from Santarem to Belterra or
starting an agricultural school on the abandoned concession. Although
technically the villages are closed to outsiders, squatters at
Belterra recently have thrown up thatch huts with mud-daubed walls
near the older, sturdier Michigan-inspired buildings.
At
Belterra, a building used to coagulate rubber to reduce its bulk
operates as a surgical-glove factory. In response to the alarming AIDS
rate in the South American country, negotiations are under way to
expand the factory to produce condoms. Ironically, none of the rubber
is from the area. “It comes from a plantation upriver,” a factory
worker noted. “We make forty-four thousand pairs of gloves a month
with about twenty-two workers on two shifts,” he observed.
“Fordlandia
is the most problematic of the facilities,” Alexander concluded,
noting that the facility is only accessible via a twelve-hour boat
ride from Santarem. “But Belterra, perhaps, can be rescued and
resuscitated.”
Szilagyi
once agreed with Alexander but now wonders if it is too late for the
plantation village he called home for nearly three years. He regrets
that a 1945 meeting to discuss the future of the concession—a
Detroit lunch meeting at which Henry Ford II was expected to question
the doctor about Fordlandia and Belterra—was postponed and never
rescheduled.
“I
would have told him that Fordlandia should be abandoned. It was a very
picturesque place and would have been a wonderful hideaway for Ford
executives—like a little Switzerland for fishing and hunting—but
it was not appropriate for a plantation,” Szilagyi said. “For
Belterra, if I had had a chance, I would have told him to keep going.
“They shouldn’t have given it up.”
Mary
Dempsy is a Detroit-based freelace writer who frequently travels on
assignment to South America. Her work appears in the Los
Angeles Times, the (Toronto) Globe
and Mail, Travel & Leisure and New
Scientist magazine.
This
article first appeared in the July/August 1994 issue of Michigan
History.
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Due to the large size of photos,
click description below to view:
Michigan-made fire hydrand in Belterra.
Belterra's white
clapboard homes
Machete-wielding
Brazilians were hired to tap the tens of thousands of rubber trees
planted at Fordlandia.
The sawmill was
transported from Michigan in pieces, then reassembled in the Brazilian
Amazon.
Belterra's broken
sidewalks and aging buildings are some of the remaining vestiges from
one of Henry Ford's more exotic experiements.
Hand molds used to make
latex gloves hang inside Balterra's former rubber-coagulating plant.
Historic photos The Henry
Ford
Color photos Mary A.
Dempsey |
