Fordlandia (50 page)

“So much for the Pringles,” wrote the doctor to officials in Dearborn, who ordered the couple to return to Michigan at the end of 1938.
15

MEANWHILE, OPINION MAKERS in Rio and São Paulo continued to clamor for a visit from Henry Ford. As they heard reports that his Amazon enterprise had solved many of its social problems only to be beset by natural ones, it seemed all the more important that he come to see his namesake plantation. Brazil’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry published an open letter in a Rio newspaper advising him to gain firsthand knowledge of the town that bore his name:

Everything in life has its right and left side, its good and bad turn. With the wonderful enterprising spirit characteristic of Henry Ford, which makes him one of the greatest men of our times, he is ready to do everything in order to develop his large rubber plantation. . . . Unluckily, however, there was one principal element lacking for the success of his enterprise: personal knowledge of the region. . . . It would be very advantageous if Ford, who is already invited officially to visit Brazil, would visit the Tapajós, and give instructions to his representatives personally, instructions which would be capable of guaranteeing the success of the operations being undertaken in Pará.

The invitations kept arriving. The president of a small college in São Paulo invited him to do a radio interview:

Your books have been widely read in Brazil, and aside from your commercial interests in the country, through the automobile that bears your name, or your properties at Fordlandia, what you say and write is always read with very great interest. It has long been hoped that you would visit the country some day. The least that could be done to bring you in direct contact with the people would be a short fifteen minute interview over the radio, where your voice would be heard, expressing your own ideas on subjects of mutual interest to you and the Brazilians.

“I think,” the president concluded his invitation, “this offers you a real opportunity to in some way establish a little more personal contact with the Brazilian people.”

But as Ford advanced in years, the man who claimed to have invented the modern world began to develop a mild case of technophobia. Despite his promotion of air flight—PR for his company’s aviation division—he didn’t really like airplanes, so his long-promised arrival on Charles Lindbergh’s
Spirit of St. Louis
was out of the question. As was, apparently, a radio interview.

Ford’s secretary cabled the college president, simply saying, “Sorry Mr. Ford unable to comply with your request. Does not broadcast.”
16

CHAPTER 22

FALLEN EMPIRE OF RUBBER

THE FINAL YEARS OF FORDLANDIA AND BELTERRA MIRRORED THE final struggles of Ford’s life; one can read in the letters and reports Archie Johnston sent back to Dearborn the history of the Ford Motor Company during the Great Depression—particularly the battles fought against unions and the growing reach of the federal government into its economic affairs. Though a protégé of Charles Sorensen, who competed with Harry Bennett for Ford’s favor, Johnston was sympathetic to Bennett, writing him letters complaining of his graying hair and the jungle heat and sending him jaguar skins, hammocks, and other Amazonian curios. Bennett, who kept a number of tigers and lions as pets at his “castle”—as his house on Geddes Road in Ann Arbor was called—was grateful, and he kept Johnston updated on his efforts to beat back unionism at the Rouge.

Ford was not alone in his opposition to collective bargaining. When Congress passed the Wagner Act in 1935, leveling the playing field somewhat in the fight between capital and labor by protecting workers engaged in organizing from arbitrary dismissal, Detroit’s Big Three all stated their resolve to remain union free. The United Automobile Workers, founded in 1935 and led by Walter and Victor Reuther, was small and practically penniless. But its members found a powerful weapon in the sit-down strike, halting production not by picketing on the outside but by refusing to leave their workstations, a move that stopped owners from hiring scabs. GM fell in 1936, signing a contract with the UAW, followed shortly by Chrysler. That left only Ford.
1

The Rouge went into lockdown. Harry Bennett added more men to the ranks of his already bloated Service Department. His gunsels stepped up their surveillance, searching lockers and lunch pails for UAW literature, following workers into bathrooms to make sure no union talk occurred, and breaking up gatherings of two or more employees. Ford wouldn’t let instruments of war be exhibited in his museum. Yet he let Bennett place machine guns atop the Rouge plant. The campaign against the UAW created a siege mentality among Ford’s managers, and Bennett used his free rein to go after not just labor organizers or potential union supporters but anyone showing any sign of disloyalty. Bennett’s men went undercover in the bars, markets, and churches that Ford workers frequented, reporting back on union sympathy and general grousing. In 1937, Bennett made front-page national headlines—just as he had five years earlier with the “Dearborn Massacre”—when photographers captured him and about forty of his men attacking Walter Reuther and other UAW members as they handed out union literature outside the factory’s Gate 4. The thugs beat Reuther bloody and then threw him down a set of stone steps. They stomped on other organizers and broke the back of a minister. One woman vomited blood after being kicked in the stomach. The assault took place outside the same gate where Bennett and his men murdered the hunger marchers.

Edsel, who not only believed unionization to be inevitable but was broadly sympathetic to the New Deal as a step toward corporate rationalization, tried to intervene to limit Bennett’s power. But Henry Ford, now seventy-four and in failing health—he would suffer a stroke in 1938—repeatedly reaffirmed Bennett’s authority over labor issues. “He has my full confidence,” he told his son. “The Ford Motor Company would be carried away,” Henry said, “there wouldn’t be anything left, if it wasn’t for Harry.”
2

Archie Johnston watched these developments from afar, and he read his own ongoing battles with labor and the Brazilian government into them. He certainly was more partial to Bennett than was Edsel, whom he equated with James Weir. “FDR’s actions,” he wrote to Charles Sorensen following GM’s and Chrysler’s surrender, are “pitifully weak.” He reported his successful defeat of Fordlandia’s “first sit down strike” in June 1937, when about seventy-one men who cut wood for the boilers occupied the powerhouse. Johnston settled it in Bennett-like fashion, depriving the strikers of food and water until they vacated the building. “Now all is in order,” he wrote.
3

But Johnston in the jungle—stymied by a chronic labor shortage despite the global depression—found himself much more vulnerable than Bennett at the Rouge. Like FDR, Brazil’s president, Getúlio Vargas, presided over a process of economic and political modernization, challenging the extreme power of landed elites and provincial politicians—power roughly analogous to the autonomy of states in the United States prior to the New Deal.
*
Johnston had welcomed Rio’s intervention when it was used to rein in the local Amazonian elite, who had made life difficult for the company. Now, though, Rio had become part of the problem.

Vargas’s government promoted new labor laws that made it easier for workers to unionize and required companies to provide paid vacations, severance pay, and pensions. Taking advantage of the new situation, workers at both Belterra and Fordlandia organized a union in early 1937 and began to file a growing number of complaints—mostly related to disputes over what union leaders described as arbitrary firings or efforts to claim newly mandated benefits—in federal labor court. As a result, government inspectors were regularly showing up at the plantations to demand access to company records and take testimony from employees. After a judge ruled that the company was subject to the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Labor—and not the Ministry of Agriculture, as Ford lawyers tried to argue as a way to exempt Ford from a new labor code—activists had become increasingly “bold,” as Johnston wrote Dearborn, in their demands. Belterra was easily accessible to the Brazilian press, so he had to act with circumspection in dealings with organizers. At the more remote Fordlandia, though, Johnston fired a number of the most vocal, including the president and vice president of the union. But they continued their activities, simply moving offshore to set up their “headquarters on an island in the river.”
4

This was not the Island of the Innocents that held the brothels and bars but rather Francisco Franco’s Urucurituba, which became a refuge for Fordlandia’s labor leaders. In general terms, Vargas’s prolabor legislation, as part of his broader political and social agenda, was designed to undercut the local power of rural potentates like Franco. It was a Vargas appointee who in the weeks after the December 1930 riot not only forced Franco to sell Pau d’Agua to Ford for a pittance but also removed him from his position as mayor of the nearby municipality of Aveiros. But these actions had one consequence that Fordlandia managers could not have foreseen: in retaliation, Franco began to support Fordlandia’s labor organizers, creating an unlikely alliance between the modernizing thrust of unions and the feudal reaction of a provincial don.
5

As did his counterparts at the Rouge, Johnston tried to keep the union at bay. “The Company,” he warned his workers, “will not tolerate labor organizations.” But after Rogge’s death and Pringle’s collapse, Johnston found himself shorthanded. The replacements Dearborn sent down lacked hands-on experience in running a plantation labor force, leaving Johnston in Belém to rely on a team of untested managers. And the law was against him. Johnston had no choice but to yield when a local judge ruled in 1939 that Ford’s rubber plantations were indeed subject to Vargas’s new federal labor law guaranteeing workers the right to organize; that same year a federal judge in the United States found the Ford Motor Company guilty of violating the Wagner Act.

Years before the River Rouge was forced to negotiate a contract with the United Automobile Workers, Fordlandia and Belterra had a union.

VARGAS REMAINED APPRECIATIVE of Ford, despite the support his administration gave to the plantation’s workers. Like Ford, the Brazilian president considered himself a modernizer. During his administration, Brazil’s road network doubled in size and the number of airports increased from 31 to 512. In any case, once it was established that Ford’s plantations were subject to new labor and social welfare legislation, government arbiters usually dismissed most of the specific complaints brought against the company by employees. Dependent on the goodwill of a president who by the end of the 1930s had assumed dictatorial powers, Edsel Ford, upon learning that Vargas intended to tour northern Brazil in late 1940 to promote the development of the region, sent him a telegram inviting him to review Belterra. Since Archie Johnston was out of the country on vacation, he asked Harry Braunstein, executive manager of Ford’s Rio assembly plant, to receive Vargas in his and his father’s name.
6

Vargas arrived at Belterra on October 8 in a hydroplane, circling overhead a few times to survey the town and planting fields before landing. As the plane pulled up to the dock and the president stepped out, Braunstein gave the signal to the band to strike up Brazil’s national anthem, sung by several hundred children from the Henry Ford and Edsel Ford schools, “properly dressed in uniforms.” When Vargas and his staff climbed into a waiting Lincoln to drive the ten miles to the plateau where Belterra was located, a number of men in the crowd asked that the motor be turned off and they be allowed to pull the president to the plantation, “signifying in that way their happiness and joy.” Braunstein prevailed on them to abandon the idea as impractical, suggesting instead that sixty or so bicyclists form an escort. Along the way, cheered by crowds of onlookers, Vargas commented on the neatness of the children’s dress and the “excellence of the road,” noting that Brazil “certainly needed more such roads.” His aide-de-camp remarked that he himself was from northern Brazil and he had never seen “as healthy a group of men as greeted the President” anywhere in the region. Once in Belterra, Vargas found much else to praise—the hospital, the dentist’s office, schools that supplied books, pencils, and uniforms free of charge to the students, a spacious dance hall and other recreation facilities, and clean, tidy houses with colorful front gardens. The presidential entourage went on a “mosquito hunt” in a number of the plantation’s screened buildings and found not a one.
7

That afternoon, Vargas gave a speech in Belterra’s new park, telling Ford’s workers that the main objective of his government was to “create social laws which would serve to establish social harmony among all, to establish frank and sincere collaboration and co-operation between employer and employee, with all working toward the same end.” Of course, he said, if there were “more men like Mr. Ford in this world no social legislation would be necessary.” He then led a round of cheers for Henry and Edsel Ford. That night at dinner, Braunstein apologized that the two Fords couldn’t be there in person to welcome him but presented Vargas with their signed photographs. He raised his glass to the president’s commitment to progress and to advancing the well-being of workers. “Mr. Ford,” Braunstein said, was the “first industrialist in the world who revolutionized the relations between worker and employer by giving them that which contributed to a life of comfort and equality, and we are doing everything within our power to follow in his footsteps in the treatment of those who work, produce, and co-operate in this project.” One day, he said, admitting that the long-promised recovery of the latex trade had so far remained elusive, it “may possibly mean the re-birth of the Amazon Valley,” the revival of the “fallen Empire of Rubber.”