Fordlandia (25 page)

Besides, Oxholm himself developed a fondness for
cachaça com limão
. Many afternoons, even before the workday had come to a close, he’d take a fast launch over to the island of Urucurituba to visit his friend Francisco Franco, who after his nephew Luiz used the money from the sale of Boa Vista to move to Belém, had taken over the main hacienda. Swaying on a hammock on Franco’s veranda, right in front of the chapel to Saint Peter, Oxholm sipped rum and watched Fordlandia’s bustle.
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BACK ON HIS side of the Tapajós, Oxholm found himself governing a community of ailing migrants. By late 1929, the workforce had grown considerably, yet on any given day about a hundred would be in the hospital sick. The “amount of medical attention for the approximately 1300 men on the payroll,” he wrote Dearborn, “is way out of proportion to what one would expect.” During the rainy season, the numbers of sick increased, taxing the hospital “to the limit.” Its beds filled with workers with suppurating sores on their feet and legs. The medical staff was charged not just with treating the sick but with screening recruits. Potential employees stripped naked in front of a Ford doctor, who examined their eyes and ears, recorded their weight and height, and took their urine.
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The company rejected 5 to 10 percent of all applicants. Some were turned away for illnesses ranging from cirrhosis and bronchitis to paralysis, hernias, and leprosy. One was blind in the right eye. Another in the left. And at least one job-seeker was too short.
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That didn’t mean everyone who got a job was healthy. More than 85 percent of job seekers had in the past suffered from at least one disease: syphilis, malaria, beriberi, dysentery, parasites, typhoid, ringworm, filariasis—caused by a mosquito-borne thread worm that infects the lymphatic system and leads to a thickening of the skin—or yaws, skin ulcers caused by bacteria. But Oxholm couldn’t afford to turn anybody with such “garden variety” illnesses away since “nearly everyone has them.” By December, a third of the hired workforce had to pass some time in the hospital before even getting started.
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He also had to deal with the employees who had contracted venereal diseases, running at a rate of about nine a month, in the camp’s bordellos. When a Ford doctor visited one of the brothels, he found that seven of its nine prostitutes had an active gynecological infection. Oxholm ordered the following sign posted around the work sites and villages:

It is a serious matter to contract venereal disease during the period of employment in this Company and the Company wishes to discourage it. Any employee having contracted venereal disease must immediately report the fact to the Medical Department. In case it is decided to hospitalize him the Company reserves the right to charge a reasonable amount to cover this service. At intervals there may be a Medical Inspection of employees to ascertain if there are any unreported cases. The disposition of these cases will be at the discretion of the Company.

As to the women, Oxholm would not treat them: “We do not want to have anything to do with them, and have absolutely refused treatment in any way, shape, or form. We hope that by doing so they will be forced to leave.”

The families of migrant workers put yet another strain on Fordlandia’s already overwhelmed health services. Plantation administrators factored into the cost of transport one wife and three children per worker. But they soon realized that workers from northeast Brazil, where many migrants to the Amazon originated, were, as one labor recruiter put it, “very prolific and 5 children should be reckoned.” The medical staff was completely unprepared to deal with the influx of these children, many of whom were malnourished and suffered from hookworm, intestinal illnesses, and jungle fevers. “While we make it a practice to examine men who enter our employ,” the captain reported to Dearborn, “we have not been examining the women and children who live in the native camp, and every river boat which reaches our property is bringing more of them. The boats are also bringing in friends and relatives of employees.” Oxholm had to relent, allowing the hospital to set up a children’s ward, which was never without a severe case of malnutrition.

To offset all these expenses, Oxholm suggested that the company abandon its promise of free medical care. He set up a payment scale that would cover job applicants who needed hospital treatment before they started working, family members who required care, and those employees who contracted venereal disease despite the posted warnings. He wanted to deduct fees from salaries, yet there was no bookkeeping system in place that could manage such accounts. It took some time to locate the office supplies that were packed in the
Farge
, and once they were found, typewriter carriages had rusted and paper had grown moldy from the humidity. The roof of the accounting office poured in water so that every time it rained “all records have to be gathered up and put away and the office force has to evacuate the building until the rain has ceased.” In any case, when Oxholm told Dearborn officials of his plan, they overruled him, insisting that medical care should remain free.

IN HIS SEARCH for labor, Oxholm also looked to the British Caribbean, which had a long history of supplying workers to large-scale construction projects throughout Latin America, such as the Panama Canal. In the first couple of months he managed to attract a number of West Indians from the upper Amazon who had survived the construction of the 228-mile Madeira-to-Mamoré train line, one of the most brutal and ill-conceived industrial projects ever executed. The line was started in the 1870s at the height of the rubber boom with the idea of bypassing a series of formidable rapids that hindered the use of the upper Madeira River, which ran roughly parallel to the Tapajós, farther west. An engineer for the first company to undertake this task called the Amazon a “charnel house,” with workers “dying like flies” as they tried to build a rail line that “ran through an inhospitable wilderness of swamp and porphyry ridges.” Even with the “command of all the capital in the world and half its population, it would be impossible to build the road.” A series of other companies were engaged to finish the job until one finally did, in 1912, just as the boom collapsed. All told, it cost $30 million and took ten thousand lives—one, it is said, for every tie that was laid.
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When the line was completed, workers, including a number of West Indians, were left abandoned in the railroad work camp of Porto Velho, which had grown into a small, destitute city. At the news that Ford was hiring, many headed down the Amazon and then up the Tapajós to the plantation. Added to these stranded West Indians rail workers were migrants who came directly from Jamaica, Barbados, and Saint Lucia.

They arrived at a camp where many of the same conditions that sparked the riot in late 1928 continued—poor housing and working conditions, particularly for those hired to clear the jungle, confusing pay schedules, and bad food—aggravated by strident attempts to regulate hygiene and enforce Prohibition. In June 1929, a knife fight broke out between a Brazilian worker and Joseph Hippolyte, a migrant from Santa Lucia, as the two men waited on line to receive their wages. Hippolyte stabbed the Brazilian, whose friends retaliated by nearly beating the Santa Lucian to death.

In his report to Sorensen, the increasingly beleaguered Oxholm seized the moment to showcase his decisiveness. He blamed the brawl on Brazilian racism, saying that it was impossible to make native workers toil alongside “foreign Negroes.” As Villares did the previous year, Oxholm claimed that his quick actions had headed off a riot, telling Sorensen that he gave all of Fordlandia’s West Indians some travel money, loaded them on a lighter, and sent them downriver.

“We think you will agree with us,” he wrote, hedging behind the plural, “that on such occasions as these a quick and decisive policy is better than dilly-dallying and waiting for events which may prove to be disastrous.”

The British consul in Belém disagreed. He wrote to Henry Ford saying that Oxholm’s emphasis on Brazilian prejudice diverted attention from his already well-known incompetence. The diplomat pointed out that for decades West Indians had worked on large-scale railway and public works projects throughout the Amazon valley “on friendly terms alongside their Brazilian fellows.” He also contested Oxholm’s claim that the plantation had covered the travel costs of the exiled workers to “wherever they wanted to go.” At least half paid their own fare to Belém, where they found themselves “strangers in a land of which they did not speak the language.” Many were stranded at the mouth of the Amazon in a “more or less destitute condition.” As a result of Oxholm’s actions, he said, Ford could no longer count on Her Majesty’s assistance in securing Caribbean workers.

“I invite the company,” the consul concluded, “to consider whether, in the circumstances described, in preference to sacrificing justice to expediency, they do not feel themselves bound, at least morally and equitably, if not legally, to assume some responsibility for the loss [to the West Indian workers] their action has involved.”
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Oxholm, though, had more pressing matters to worry about. Rubber planter, construction manager, town planner, health care provider, Prohibitionist, the sea captain had yet another responsibility to discharge: undertaker.

By the end of 1929, ninety people had been buried in the company cemetery, sixty-two of them workers and the rest “outsiders who had died on the property.” Most of the deaths were from malnutrition and common disease. But lethal snakebites, from vipers especially, infections from ant, hornet, or vampire bat bites, and, before proper shelters were built, jaguars, which occasionally snatched babies right from their hammocks, all made the plantation especially dangerous during those early years. Oxholm’s maid had her arm bitten off by a caiman and bled to death while bathing in the Tapajós. And the company was responsible for interring all who died on the plantation, not just workers. As Oxholm explained to Dearborn, Brazil’s civil code required that “if strangers come to our property and we render them aid we are responsible for their burial in the event of death”—a law that invoked a bond between death, community, and soil reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez’s observation, made in a novel about the foundation of another doomed town, that “a person doesn’t belong to a place until there is someone dead underground.” A year later, there were three times as many graves—including four that contained Oxholm’s own children.

BY THE END of 1928, it seems that Ford—who once claimed to have invented the modern world and all that went with it—found himself in much the same position as did Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores centuries earlier: presiding over an enormous land grant populated by quite a number of dependents. Friend Ford had become Lord Ford.

CHAPTER 12

THE FORD WAY OF THINKING

TO FORD’S PEOPLE BACK IN DEARBORN, THE CONFLUENCE OF EVENTS in Brazil hampering the development of the plantation—threats to revoke export tax exemptions, seizure of seeds, levies of import duties, rebellious workers, and relentless bad press—seemed like a conspiracy, a confirmation of preexisting prejudices many of them had about doing business in Latin America. What to do? The decision to invest in rubber cultivation had been based on the assumption that Ford’s Amazon operation would pay for itself, not with latex at first but with the sale of lumber or minerals. But mounting costs and floundering construction proved such a forecast wildly optimistic. Already by the beginning of 1929, Ford had spent over a million and a half dollars with little to show for it. An even greater concern than the money was Ford’s reputation, for newspapers and newsreels had already announced the imminent rescue of the Amazon from the “scrap heap of civilization.” So with Henry Ford “exercised” about import duties, and Charles Sorensen “annoyed” by Oxholm’s inability to resolve matters, the company did something Ford had always been loath to do: it turned to Washington for help.
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The Ford Motor Company had extensive overseas business interests. Yet remarkably it had no contacts, either formal or personal, with anyone in the State Department. Edsel had to go to Herbert Hoover, now president, while the company’s chief lawyer, Clifford Longley, approached Attorney General William Mitchell, asking to be put in touch with the right people. Out of these inquiries, Sorensen obtained a meeting with Dana Munro, the assistant secretary of state for Latin America. But when he traveled to Washington to ask for help in putting pressure on Rio, Munro treated Sorensen coolly. This was perhaps to be expected considering the company’s long history of cold-shouldering US diplomats. Whatever the reason, the assistant secretary considered Ford’s Brazilian tax problem routine and simply sent off a perfunctory directive to the embassy in Brazil to render whatever assistance possible. To little effect. The American ambassador, about to sail to Europe on his summer vacation, had left his considerably less influential deputy to handle the matter.
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With no help from Washington forthcoming, Ford appointed William Cowling as his personal representative and dispatched him to Brazil to make things right. A loyal “Fordling”—as midlevel executives without official title were known—Cowling was but the first of many such fixers Dearborn would send to Brazil over the next couple of years.
3

Cowling arrived in Rio on August 8, 1929, and spent the next nine days meeting with government officials and other “people of importance.” He wasn’t looking for a quick settlement. He sensed that the game would not be won by legal or moral righteousness. Although Sorensen and other company officials saw Ford’s problems in Brazil as all connected, Cowling knew they sprang from different sources, especially from confused lines of authority separating state and federal jurisdiction. It was the national government that imposed import duties and embargoed building material sent from Dearborn, while the state governments applied export taxes. Who had the power to impede interstate commerce and seize Ford’s seeds was anybody’s guess, and Cowling left that issue to be decided by Brazil’s Supreme Court.