From Fordlandia to Fiction: few and far between...
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
by Greg Grandin
You could call it a case of horse and buggy thinking or square peg-round hole reasoning if the subject at hand wasn’t Henry Ford, automotive genius and master of assembly line production. Does it make sense, then, for the re-creation of small town American simplicity – as constituted in Ford’s bold endeavor in the heart of the Amazon from the 1920s through 1945 — to be championed by such a contradictory industrialist: the pacifist, the internationalist, the virulent anti-Semite, the $5-a-day friend of the workingman, the anti-union crusader, the man who ushered America into the industrial age yet rejected the social changes that followed urbanization? But no matter how commendable his goals in a missionary application of Ford-style capitalism — high wages, humane benefits, moral improvement – in Fordlandia, as his utopian settlement was called, the inventor’s attempt to establish a rubber industry and an attendant "work of civilization" in the rain forests of Brazil were not to last. Not in the face of worker resistance, climbing costs, disease, faltering construction, and government blundering. As indigenous workers, rejecting Ford’s Midwestern Puritanism, turned the plantation into a brutal tropical boomtown, the weekly dances, garden clubs, tennis courts, movies, schools and hospitals, were soon seen to make no economic sense. Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City serves as a cautionary tale and reminds us that the ultimate demise of Ford’s plantation paradise foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. At the same time, Greg Grandin concludes in his enthralling chronicle that "Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism - and by extension Americanism." And no bailout!
The Devil's Tickets: A Night of Bridge, a Fatal Hand, and a New American Age
by Gary M. Pomerantz
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