Fordlandia (56 page)

*
BR-163 remains unpaved for little more than half its run from Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso—where most of Brazil’s soy is grown—to Santarém. And in its current dirt and mud state, even during the dry season, it’s too rough for major corporations like Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, and the Brazilian-owned Maggi Group to use. They instead ship their soy overland about 1,200 miles south to one of Brazil’s two major Atlantic ports or truck it about 500 miles northwest on a paved two-lane highway to Porto Velho, load it on barges, and float it down the Madeira and Amazon rivers. Once blacktopped, the highway will be a quick and cheap way for landlocked Mato Grosso planters to get their product to Santarém’s deepwater harbor, where it can be loaded on cargo ships and sent on its way. But environmentalists fear that an asphalt road will hasten the spread of soy, as well as logging and cattle ranching, deeper into the Amazon and quicken its destruction.

*
Belterra never sent much rubber back to Detroit, but soon its soy will be making its way into Ford cars. In July 2008, Cargill started construction in Chicago on a state-of-the-art factory designed to produce mass quantities of industrial-quality plastic made from soybeans, including soy shipped from the company’s Santarém port. One of Cargill’s customers is the Ford Motor Company, which plans to use the plastic in its 2009 Ford Escape (“Cargill Builds First Full-Scale BiOH Polyols Manufacturing Plant,” Cargill press release, July 8, 2008,
www.cargill.com/news/news_releases/080708_biohplant.htm)
.

NOTES

Introduction: Nothing Is Wrong with Anything

1
. “Police Protect Ford and Edison at N.Y. Auto Show,”
Atlanta Constitution
, January 11, 1928.

2
. Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill,
Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933
, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957, pp. 437–59; “Remarks,”
Time
, January 16, 1928.

3
. “No ‘Price War’ for His Concern, Mr. Ford Insists,”
Christian Science Monitor
, January 9, 1928; “Henry Ford Coming Today,”
New York Times
, January 9, 1928; “Remarks,”
Time
, January 16, 1928.

4
. “Ford Plans Plane Trip to Brazil Rubber Tract,”
Washington Post
, January 10, 1928; “Ford Plans Brazil Flight,”
Los Angeles Times
, January 10, 1928; “Henry Ford’s Voyage,”
Washington Post
, January 11, 1928; “Ford Met Marshall Here,”
New York Times
, January 16, 1928; “Dr. Wise Proposes Inquiry on Jews,”
New York Times
, January 9, 1928.

5
. “Ford to Continue Effort to Produce Aero at Car Price,”
Washington Post
, March 4, 1928.

6
. “Ford Sees Hoover the Next President,”
New York Times
, January 10, 1928; “Ford Gets Big Area to Grow Rubber,”
New York Times
, October 12, 1927.

7
. William N. McNairn and Marjorie McNairn,
Quotations from the Unusual Henry Ford
, Redondo Beach, Calif.: Quotamus Press, 1978, p. 101.

8
. Arnold Höllriegel, “Ford in Brazil,”
Living Age
, May 1932, p. 221, reprinted from the
Berliner Tageblatt
; Elaine Lourenço, “Americanos e caboclos: Encontros e desencontros em Fordlândia e Belterra-PA,” master’s thesis, Universidad de São Paulo, 1999, p. 38; David Grann, “The Lost City of Z,”
New Yorker
, September 19, 2005.

9
. “Ford Rubber,”
Time
, October 24, 1927; “Fordlandia, Brazil,”
Washington Post
, August 12, 1931.

10
. See P. H. Fawcett,
Lost Trails, Lost Cities
, New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1953, p. 267; Brian Fawcett,
Ruins in the Sky
, London: Hutchinson, 1958; and Peter Fleming,
Brazilian Adventure
, New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1933.

11
. Aubrey Stuart, trans.,
How Henry Ford Is Regarded in Brazil; Articles by Monteiro Lobato
, Rio de Janeiro, 1926 (available in Yale’s Sterling Library); Thomas Skid-more, “Brazil’s American Illusions: From Dom Pedro II to the Coup of 1964,”
Luso-Brazilian Review
23 (Winter 1986): 77.

12
. Theodore Roosevelt,
Through the Brazilian Wilderness
, New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000, p. 217. See also Candice Millard,
“The River of Doubt:” Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey
, New York: Doubleday, 2005; Francis Gow Smith, “The King of the Xingu,”
Atlanta Constitution
, December 16, 1928.

13
. John Hemming,
Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon
, London: Thames and Hudson, 2008, p. 203; Candace Slater,
Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon
, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p. 46; Susanna B. Hecht, “The Last Unfinished Page of Genesis: Euclides da Cunha and the Amazon,”
Historical Geography
32 (2004): 43–69.

14
.
Burden of Dreams
, documentary, dir. Liess Blank, Flower Films, 1982.

15
. Jonathan Norton Leonard,
The Tragedy of Henry Ford
, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932, p. 108; “Sober Thoughts on Things and Kings,”
New York Times
, April 27, 1930; “Life in Fordlandia!”
Iron Mountain Daily News
, May 18, 1932.

16
.
Washington Post
, September 5, 1928.

17
. Kenneth Grubb,
Amazon and the Andes
, New York: Dial Press, 1930, p. 14; A. Ogden Pierrot, “A Visit to Fordlandia,”
Rubber Age
, April 10, 1932.

18
.
http://www.cremesp.org.br/?siteAcao=Revista=247
(accessed May 8, 2008).

19
. Frederick Upham Adams,
Conquest of the Tropics: The Story of the Creative Enterprises Conducted by the United Fruit Company
, New York: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1914, pp. 9, 114.

20
. Perry Miller,
Errand into the Wilderness
, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975, pp. 1–15; Harry Bernstein, “Some Inter-American Aspects of the Enlightenment,”
Latin America and the Enlightenment
, ed. Arthur Whitaker, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1961, pp. 53–55.

21
. “Ford Tire Plants Planned in Brazil,”
New York Times
, November 16, 1928; “The Ford Shutdown,”
Washington Post
, September 18, 1922.

22
. National Archives, microfilm 1472, roll 40, RG 59, 832.6176/58, Drew to State, February 14, 1930.

23
. Douglas Brinkley,
Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903–2003
, New York: Viking, 2003, p. 232.

Chapter 1: Under an American Flag

1
. “Churchill Defends Rubber Restrictions,”
New York Times
, March 13, 1923; “Churchill Sarcastic over Debt Policy,”
New York Times
, July 20, 1924; Charles R. Whittlesey,
Government Control of Crude Rubber: The Stevenson Plan
, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1931; Austin Coates,
The Commerce in Rubber: The First 250 Years
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 205–64; Barry Machado, “Farquhar and Ford in Brazil: Studies in Business Expansion and Foreign Policy,” PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1975, p. 274.

2
. “Hoover Contrasts Wheat and Rubber,”
New York Times
, December 30, 1925; Machado, “Farquhar and Ford,” p. 205.

3
. “Rubber Manufacturers Discuss Supply Question,”
Wall Street Journal
, February 28, 1923; “Rubber Men Record Protest to Britain,”
New York Times
, February 28, 1923; Coates,
The Commerce in Rubber
, pp. 233, 232; Alfred Lief,
Harvey Firestone: Free Man of Enterprise
, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951, pp. 228, 231.

4
. Machado, “Farquhar and Ford,” p. 245.

5
. Machado, “Farquhar and Ford,” p. 201; Nevins and Hill,
Ford
, pp. 396–97; Royal Davis, “Cycles in the Automobile Pneumatic Tire Renewal Market in the United States,”
Journal of the American Statistical Association
, vol. 26, no. 173, Supplement: Proceedings of the American Statistical Association (March 1931), pp. 10–19.

6
. Ford Bryan,
Friends, Families, and Forays: Scenes from the Life and Times of Henry Ford
, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002, p. 247.

7
. Benson Ford Research Center (BFRC), accession 65, Reminiscences, E. G. Liebold, ch. 10.

8
. Lief,
Harvey Firestone
, p. 51.

9
. BFRC, accession 285, box 545, June 8, 1926, Raskob to Ford; BFRC, accession 65, Reminiscences, E. G. Liebold, ch. 10.

10
. BFRC, accession 65, Reminiscences, E. G. Liebold, ch. 10.

11
. Warren Dean,
Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History
, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 4.

12
. E. Bradford Burns, “1910: Portrait of a Boom Town,”
Journal of Inter-American Studies
7 (July 1965): 410; “A Thousand Miles Up the Amazon,”
Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly
, March 1897; “Valley of the Amazon,”
New York Times
, July 23, 1899; Brian Lewis, “The Queer Life and Afterlife of Roger Casement,”
Journal of the History of Sexuality
14 (October 2005): 371; “Para and Manos,”
Los Angeles Times
, June 18, 1899.

13
. Hemming,
Tree of Rivers
, p. 202.

14
. José Maria Ferreira de Castro,
A Selva
, Lisbon: Guimaraes Editores, 1991 (first published in 1930); Hemming,
Tree of Rivers
, pp. 203–5; Hecht, “The Last Unfinished Page of Genesis.”

15
. Robert F. Murphy, “The Rubber Trade and the Mundurucú Indians,” PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1954, 71.

16
. Murphy, “The Rubber Trade,” p. 8.

17
. Joe Jackson,
The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire
, New York: Viking, 2008.

18
. J. T. Baldwin, “David B. Riker and
Hevea brasiliensis
: The Taking of Rubber Seeds Out of the Amazon,”
Economic Botany
22 (October–December 1968): 383; Dean,
Struggle for Rubber
, pp. 7, 13–28, 90, 177–80.

19
. Hemming,
Tree of Rivers
, pp. 96–97.

Chapter 2: The Cow Must Go

1
. Roosevelt,
Through the Brazilian Wilderness
, p. 195.

2
. Leonard,
The Tragedy of Henry Ford
, p. 120.

3
. Brinkley,
Wheels for the World
, p. 141; David A. Hounshell,
From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States
, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984, pp. 10, 217–62.

4
. Robert Lacey,
Ford: The Men and the Machine
, Boston: Little, Brown, 1986, p. 109.

5
. Brinkley,
Wheels for the World
, p. 155; Julian Street,
Abroad at Home
, New York: Century, 1914, pp. 93–94.

6
. Keith Sward,
The Legend of Henry Ford
, New York: Rinehart, 1948, p. 37.

7
. Brinkley,
Wheels for the World
, pp. 159, 373; McNairn and McNairn,
Quotations
, p. 47.