Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

by Greg Grandin

Book Overview

The stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805082360
• ISBN13: 9780805082364
• Release Date: June 2009
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

More Than Ford, but Great on Ford

Being a Detroiter whose grandfather and mother who worked at the Rouge, and who worked in the Iron Foundry and on the trains beneath the Rouge, who later in life researched Ford's schools in the US, who studied with great care the relationship between the Fords and the workers, I thought I knew Ford. I did not. In this brilliant and carefully documented (read the footnotes for sure) study of not just Fordlandia, but the social relations people form in their struggle with nature in order to create life, means of production, knowledge, and freedom, the author investigates one form of capitalism that mostly likely Ford and others believed would create abundance, hence equality and harmony. How that worked out is done in well written detail in this wonderful book that I am urging everyone to read as we witness other Fordlandias growing---as nations under fire.

A truly great read for those who like history and great storytelling!

It is seldom that I enjoy reading this type of history just for the sheer entertainment and of course the history lessons it offers. This isn't the first book about Henry Ford's South American adventure and attempt to corner the world market for rubber, and I can't say that I have read all the others so I can't offer a comparison, in fact it has been only a dozen years or so since the last one, and that too was titled "Fordlandia." but I believe that was a fictionalized account. After the unimaginable success of Ford's Model T, and in the '30s he is the wealthiest man in the world, Henry Ford is launching The Model A, and this time he is offering several more color options than black. He has also aquired Lincoln Motors and entered into the luxury car market, so with his son Edsel they embark on a plan to build a city, complete with golf courses and other amenities of civilization to lure workers to his new utopia carved out of the wilderness. It is truly an amazing story of big business, greed, hubris and even anti-semitism. The writing is sometimes rough, and uneven, but the immense amount of research Grandin has done is evident, and the original photos included and spread throughout the text increase the pleasure of reading this volume..