A couple of interesting articles about Henry Ford’s 1930s attempt to bypass expensive British-Dutch rubber plantations by in Asia building a Michigan-style town in the middle of the Amazon.
Scores of Ford employees were relocated to the site, and over the first few months an American-as-apple-pie community sprung up from what was once a jungle wilderness. It included a power plant, a modern hospital, a library, a golf course, a hotel, and rows of white clapboard houses with wicker patio furniture. As the town’s population grew, all manner of businesses followed, including tailors, shops, bakeries, butcher shops, restaurants, and shoemakers. It grew into a thriving community with Model T Fords frequenting
the neatly paved streets.[…] Henry Ford’s miniature America in the jungle attracted a slew of workers. Local laborers were offered a wage of thirty-seven cents a day to work on the fields of Fordlândia, which was about double the normal rate for that line of work. But Ford’s effort to transplant America– what he called “the healthy lifestyle”– was not limited to American buildings, but also included mandatory “American” lifestyle and values. The plantation’s cafeterias were self-serve, which was not the local custom, and they provided
only American fare such as hamburgers. Workers had to live in American-style houses, and they were each assigned a number which they had to wear on a badge– the cost of which was deducted from their first paycheck. Brazilian laborers were also required to attend squeaky-clean American festivities on weekends, such as poetry readings, square-dancing, and English-language sing-alongs.
Plagued by a lack of horticultural expertise, cross-cultural differences with the locals, isolation, and, ultimately, the development of synthetic rubber in WWII, the two sites — Fordlandia, and its successor, Belterra — were sold back to the Brazilian government after Ford had plowed $20-30MM (1930s dollars) into them.
*frelling Typekey eat my comment*
So, not logged in for two weeks, and not even two hours……GRRR!
Okay…again.
Yes, I cannot find it now, but reminds me of a PBS show about Ford and his ideas. One segment dealt with him building his “Ideal” town for his workers where they had to live and work to what he though was the way to live (no, no, not a company town ;P). It started off well enough (well, there was some problems with folks being forced to convert from Catholicism to Protestantism from the beginning). But soon people got tired of being forced to do as he said 24/7 or being left homeless and jobless if they didn’t (a lot of the same things as in Fordlandia) and it soon failed and became a normal town after just a few years when he sold off all of the town.
Yeah, Ford was … an interesting fellow.
One of Ford’s major ideas was to own the production of raw materials that went into his cars rather than just buying from a supplier. He bought and replanted forrests to produce wood for his cars (yes, cars had a lot of wood in them prior to 1930). In 1921 Henry Ford wanted to find a use for the growing piles of wood scraps from the production of Model Ts. Ford learned of a process for turning the wood scraps into charcoal briquets, and one of his relatives, E.G. Kingsford, helped select the site for Ford’s charcoal plan hence the Kingsford name.
He did, however, believe in an “American” way of life and was not afraid to expect specific behaviors from of his employees. For many years, his payment of wages in excess of his competitors keep his employees quiet; it also allowed them to be able to buy the cars he sold.