Fordlandia (22 page)

Workers clearing the jungle pose for a photo
.

In early November, with the
Ormoc
and
Farge
still stuck in Santarém, tensions came to a head. When the crew’s cook served yet another meal of rotten meat and stinking fish, “hell was loosed.” Demanding “good food the same for all,” they sacked the kitchen and storehouse. The rioters armed themselves with the machetes and cutlasses and chased the Americans into the woods or out into the river on boats. In a letter to his former comanager, Blakeley, now in Dearborn, Villares claimed credit for restoring calm, saying that he slaughtered two steers to feed the men and brokered a deal in which they would get their wages if they promised not to hurt the Americans or destroy plantation property. There were, he pointed out, hundreds of gallons of kerosene and two hundred pounds of dynamite within their reach.
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But like most other things having to do with Villares, it was hard to figure out where the line separating fact and self-promotion lay. Even before the riot, the Americans, particularly John Rogge and Curtis Pringle, had lost patience with the Brazilian. At first they thought him to be “energetic and capable.” Yet at the plantation site Villares proved to be supremely impractical. He displayed little knowledge of agriculture, while Brazilian workers, who relied on him as an interpreter to communicate with the Americans, found him haughty. Villares knew enough about the Amazon to know that what the Americans were doing—especially when it came to clearing and burning the jungle during the rainy season—was wrong. But he didn’t know enough to say clearly what should be done and so only contributed to the work site’s confusion. During the riot a gang of workers chased him into the woods, where he fell into a ditch and fractured his finger and nearly broke a leg. He made his way to Belém, only to be ordered to leave the country immediately, by his coconspirator Governor Bentes, in a last-minute bid to suppress a brewing scandal that was about to reveal to all of Brazil the shady dealings that went into granting Ford his land concession.

It turns out that Captain Greite did not tear up the letter Villares had sent him two years earlier from Detroit’s Cadillac Hotel, after the meeting with the Fords where Villares pitched the idea of “Fordville” and “Edselville.” He instead made a copy of it, along with every other document related to the Ford swindle. Believing that his partners were shortchanging him, Greite handed them over to a local newspaper, which passed them on to Brazil’s Communist Party’s newspaper,
A Manhã
, for publication in Rio.

In early 1929, the story of the kickbacks and payoffs behind the concession exploded in the press. It all came out: the “ghoulish motives” of Greite, the “puerile tactics” of Schurz and Villares, the cash to Bentes and others. “While Greite and Villares received a good share of the opprobrium attached to the transaction,” the American consul in Belém wrote to the State Department, “Bentes and the Ford Company received the brunt of the blame.” The press expressed its indignation at the bribery that led to the concession, but US diplomats thought the graft trivial compared with the corruption that usually attended the expansion of American corporations abroad. It was common practice for US companies to put local officials on the payroll for nonexistent consulting services, to disperse company shares to politicians, and to give outright bribes. In establishing his rubber plantation in Liberia, Harvey Firestone, for instance, floated a $5 million loan to government officials that helped things go considerably more smoothly for him in Africa than they did for Ford in Brazil. “Nearly all large companies,” wrote US commercial attaché Carlton Jackson, who replaced William Schurz, “have learned to be ‘practical.’ ” But the Ford Motor Company bribed just enough to provoke a scandal but not enough to keep it quiet. The controversy’s real damage, then, was not to Ford’s reputation for honesty but rather to his reputation for competence. The great man, it seemed, was snookered by a syndicate of bungling and bickering provincials into paying for land that was being given away free.
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Jorge Villares
, back left,
and work crew with axes and machetes
.

VILLARES PROBABLY DIDN’T welcome the scandal’s publicity. Yet for the nephew of Alberto Santos-Dumont, who Brazilians insist was robbed of the credit for inventing the airplane, there were worse fates than to be known as the man who bested Ford. Claiming to be suffering a nervous breakdown, Villares, induced by “threats, together with the payment of a sum of money”—both courtesy of Governor Bentes—boarded a steamer headed for France to retrieve his aviator uncle, who really had suffered an emotional collapse.
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The disappointment of Alberto Santos-Dumont’s life was not that he didn’t get credit for inventing flight, though he did resent that the Wright brothers won all the acclaim. His real heartbreak was that he lived long enough to see the machine he helped develop be used as an instrument of death. Santos-Dumont wasn’t an ideological pacifist like Henry Ford, but he did hope that airplanes would knit humanity closer together in a new peaceful community, just as Ford had believed that his car, along with other modern machinery, could bring about a warless world and a global “parliament of man.” Both were of course proven wrong by World War I, which broke the conceit of many like Ford and Santos-Dumont that technology alone would usher in a new, higher stage of civilization. “I use a knife to slice gruyere,” Santos-Dumont said when war broke out in Europe, “but it can also be used to stab someone. I was a fool to be thinking only of the cheese.”
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Ford dealt erratically with the fact that, after all his high-handed opposition to World War I, he turned his factories over to war production. He continued to speak out provocatively against war, maintaining his position that soldiers were murderers and quoting Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” to the end of his days. Yet Ford’s faith in America as a revitalizing force in the world led him to say that he would support another war to do away with militarism. “I want the United States to clean it all up,” he said. No wonder the Topeka
Daily Capital
said that Ford put the “fist in pacifist.”
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Santos-Dumont, in contrast, was crippled by just his mere association to a machine that was used for mass murder. He held himself “personally responsible for every fatality” caused by his “babies,” that is, airplanes. “He now believes that he is more infamous than the devil,” commented a friend. “A feeling of repentance invades him and leaves him in a flood of tears.”
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After the war he vainly called on governments and the League of Nations to “demilitarize’ the airplane (a call that the surviving Wright brother, Orville, didn’t support. Orville invoked a different kind of technological utopianism, insisting instead that the plane itself “has made war so terrible that I do not believe any country will again care to start a war”). But the slaughter continued, and death from above became a constitutive fact of modern life. Britain, for instance, encouraged by Minister of War and Air Winston Churchill, regularly bombed and strafed Arabs as a way of maintaining cost-effective control over its colonies. And on July 16, 1927, just a week after Ide and Blakeley arrived in Belém, US marines in Nicaragua staged their first dive-bombing campaign, against the rebel Augusto Sandino. Marine pilots descended to three hundred feet to fire four thousand rounds of ammunition and drop twenty-seven bombs on anything that moved. Hundreds were killed in the slaughter.
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Throughout the 1920s, Santos-Dumont found himself checking in and out of various European sanatoriums, refusing to eat and losing weight. Death seemed to pursue him. Persuaded by his nephew Jorge to return to Brazil, Santos-Dumont arrived home a hero. A dozen of Brazil’s leading politicians, intellectuals, and engineers boarded the
Santos-Dumont
, a bimotored seaplane, to meet the steamship that carried the flyer and his nephew as it entered Rio’s harbor. But celebration turned to tragedy when one of the plane’s motors exploded, plunging its passengers and crew members to their deaths and Santos-Dumont deeper into depression. When the ship landed at the quay, the aviator was “greeted with profound silence by the multitude.”
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And the killing continued. War broke out in early 1932 between Bolivia and Paraguay over a stretch of worthless, hellishly hot scrubland thought to hold oil. It was a fully mechanized slaughter, with both sides borrowing copious amounts of money from foreign banks and petroleum companies to purchase tanks and planes. By the time it was over, more than a hundred thousand Bolivians and Paraguayans were dead. That same year, after witnessing the aerial bombing of his beloved city of São Paulo by federal forces putting down a regional revolt, Santos-Dumont committed suicide. Having sent his nephew Jorge out on an errand, he spoke his last words to an elevator operator as he returned to his room to hang himself: “What have I done?”
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BACK IN THE AMAZON, Bentes had left the governor’s mansion for the federal senate just before the scandal broke, yet the controversy effectively ended his political career. His replacement as governor, Eurico de Freitas Valle, took office in February 1929 and immediately announced that he would review, and revise if necessary, the Ford concession.
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A committed nationalist who was fearful of a Ford monopoly over either rubber or lumber, Governor Valle first canceled the grant’s across-the-board export tax exemption. The Ford Motor Company took this gravely. While officials hoped that the property would hold oil or valuable minerals such as gold and maybe even diamonds, they knew it was rich in hardwoods and Dearborn assumed that the sale of lumber would cover the plantation’s startup costs. Adding to their aggravation, Valle decreed that only rubber cultivated at Fordlandia—and not latex tapped from wild trees on the property or purchased from tappers working elsewhere—would be covered by the tax exclusion.

Valle’s moves had an immediate impact. Shortly after he announced his revocation of Ford’s tax exemption, the governor of Amazonas—the state to the northwest of Pará whose capital was Manaus—had twenty-four cases of rubber seeds destined for Ford’s plantation seized and impounded. Ford intended to ship the seeds to California or the Philippines, he claimed—implicitly but none too subtly associating Henry Ford with the usurper Henry Wickham.
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These seeds had been obtained by Ford agents in the upper Amazon, on the advice of Carl LaRue, who thought the western region was home to a purer and more productive strain of
Hevea
than what was found around Fordlandia, even though it was he who had recommended the southeastern bank of the Tapajós as the best place to grow rubber. In any case, the embargo of the seeds, combined with the delay unloading the
Ormoc
and
Farge
, left plantation managers scurrying to find local seeds. If they didn’t succeed in planting a thousand acres by the end of July 1929—a stipulation of the Bentes contract intended to ensure that Ford’s proposed rubber plantation was not simply a cover for a quest for oil, diamonds, or gold—then Valle would have grounds to revoke the concession.

Caught between Belém and Manaus, the plantation also had to answer to Rio. Contrary to Blakeley’s assurances that the federal government had released the company from most import taxes, customs officials insisted that Ford pay duty on all material and machinery not directly related to rubber cultivation. When the
Ormoc
and
Farge
first arrived in Belém, Oxholm had left a deposit of $12,000 to be used against future levies. Port authorities didn’t want to hold up the ships by inspecting their crammed holds, so they waved them through. But now they said that Ford owed an additional $58,000 for the initial shipment and that henceforth all shipments would have to pay assessed duties in full before proceeding upriver.
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From 1929 to 1931, the
Ormoc
made successive round-trips, bringing material from Detroit to the Amazon and stopping in British Guyana on the way back to load bauxite for the Rouge’s metal works. As the cargo piled up on Belém’s docks, the company’s tax bill soared. Ford lawyers argued that
all
material brought in was ultimately to support the cultivation of rubber, but port authorities interpreted the law narrowly, disqualifying the equipment needed to build the town, cut wood, sink wells, run train lines, construct houses, and lay roads. Company officials negotiated to release some imports, thereby allowing construction to proceed. Yet by March 1931, sixteen thousand tons of Ford goods—paint, steel, train rails, shelving, furniture, tools, stationery, hospital machines, surveying equipment, lab instruments, electrical parts, enameled sinks, and many other things—still sat unused in a customs warehouse.
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