Photo Caption: Fordlandia, an American city and manufacturing hub located in Brazil, where the air is so thick you can capture it on film. Photo courtesy of The Collections of Henry Ford.
Nowadays, that’s how history is remembered: the bad, with a splash of good here and there. Having obviously never met Henry Ford, I can’t comment on him personally, but I feel like most people generally wouldn’t have liked being in close association with him. Despite all of that, I find myself drawn to the Model T more than I am to the Model A, or any of the other, later cars, as a matter of fact.
They’re so mechanically ingenious that they’re almost overly complicated, and although they’re drawn almost entirely with ninety-degree angles, there are just enough compound curves in just the right places to make them appealing. Henry resisted changes, such as the introduction of the Model-A and hydraulic brakes. The later ones are my favourite, from 23-25 and the 26-27, but they all have their own charm.
During Model T production, Ford introduced the assembly line and a five-dollar minimum daily wage. It seems people in America enjoyed working for him, so when tire supply became an issue, it only made sense to become his own tire supplier and employ even more people in another area.
In the late 1920s, Ford headed down to Brazil to buy a chunk of land, where he planned to grow and harvest rubber trees to secure a supply of rubber to make his own tires. It was 5,625 square miles in the Northern Amazon, to be exact. Knowing that finding qualified help in the Amazon would be tough, he had to make it worthwhile for staff, so he decided to create his nation, Fordlandia.
My understanding is that it was to be a manufacturing city with a residential suburb and would operate similar to a state. However, information on how it was to be governed is slim. I think the main reason for the lack of information is the fact that it was a massive failure and didn’t make it that far. The rubber trees didn’t grow due to parasites and disease, and those that survived never produced.
Local workers weren’t accustomed to the American way of life, and there were tons of labour issues. There was a school, hospital, movie theatre, dance hall, water tower, sawmill, generators, paved roads, housing, everything a city would need, but sadly it was an idea that just didn’t work out.
When Henry Ford II took over at the end of World War II, he considered Fordlandia a liability and sold it back to Brazil. Fordlandia was designed for a population of ten-thousand people. At the peak, only four hundred people lived there, and I’m assuming most of those were hospital staff, school teachers, city workers and contractors since not a single tire was ever produced there.
Have a question or comment for Kelly? Post it at lmtimes.ca/kirk
