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Greg Grandin, "Fordlandia" (2009)
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Jeffrey Rubard
Sep 10, 2023, 5:32:06 PM9/10/23
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From Chapter 15: "Kill All the Americans"
It took Dearborn's purchasing agents some effort to find a factory whistle that wouldn't rust from the jungle humidity. Once they did, they shipped it to Fordlandia, where it was perched on top of the water tower, above the tall trees, giving it a seven-mile range. The whistle was piercing enough not only to reach dispersed road gangs and fieldhands but to be heard across the river, where even those not affiliated with Fordlandia began to pace their day to its regularly scheduled blows. The whistle was supplemented by another icon of industrial factory work: pendulum punch time clocks, placed at different locations around the plantation, that recorded exactly when each employee began and ended his workday.
Sponsor Message
In Detroit, immigrant workers by the time they got to Ford's factories, even if they were peasants and shepherds, had had ample opportunity to adjust to the meter of industrial life. The long lines at Ellis Island, the clocks that hung on the walls of depots and waiting rooms, the fairly precise schedules of ships and trains, and standardized time that chopped the sun's daily arc into zones combined to guide their motions and change their inner sense of how the days passed.
But in the Amazon, the transition between agricultural time and industrial time was much more precipitous. Prior to showing up at Fordlandia, many of the plantation's workers who had lived in the region had set their pace by two distinct yet complementary timepieces. The first was the sun, its rise and fall marking the beginning and end of the day, its apex signaling the time to take to the shade and sleep. The second was the turn of the seasons: most of the labor needed to survive was performed during the relatively dry months of June to November. Rainless days made rubber tapping possible, while the recession of the floods exposed newly enriched soils, ready to plant, and concentrated fish, making them easier to catch. But nothing was set in stone. Excessive rain or prolonged periods of drought or heat led to adjustments of schedules. Before the coming of Ford, Tapajos workers lived time, they didn't measure it — most rarely ever heard church bells, much less a factory whistle. It was difficult, therefore, as David Riker, who performed many jobs for Ford, including labor recruiter, said, "to make 365-day machines out of these people."
In 1927, Henry Ford bought a tract of land stretching twice the size of Deleware in the Amazonian jungle of Brazil. Fordlandia, as it was called, was meant to be a large rubber plantation.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Ford executives stand on the deck of the Lake Ormoc. Left to right: William Cowling, Edsel Ford, Einar Oxholm, Henry Ford, Pete Martin, Charles Sorensen, and AlbertWibel.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Workers chop down a tree in Fordlandia. Greg Grandin, author of "Fordlandia," claims that the complex ecological conditions and a clash of cultures between the Americans and native workers ultimately led to the failure of the project.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Along with the construction of the rubber plantation, Ford also created small American towns that included central squares, indoor plumbing, golf courses and hospitals.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Many of the plantation workers were to the jungle and were moved into American style housing.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
This family bungalow was part of a housing development styled after American homes.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Attempting to import American culture into the Amazon, Fordlandia offered residents a dance hall, with a movie screen on the back wall.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Malaria, yellow fever and viper bites claimed the lives of many workers.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Mundurucu mission children stand with German nuns.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
The American cars were no match for the local environment.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Fordlandia's sawmill at Iron Mountain still stands 80 years later.
1 OF 11
Fordlandia's managers and foremen, in contrast, were mostly engineers, precise in their measurement of time and motion. One of the first things the Americans did was set their watches and clocks to Detroit time, where Fordlandia remains to this day (nearby Santarem runs an hour earlier). They scratched their heads when confronted with workers they routinely described as "lazy." Archie Weeks's daughter remembers her father throwing his straw hat on the ground more than once in frustration. With a decided sense of purpose that grated against the established rhythms of Tapajos life (David Riker liked to say that hurry was an "obscene" word in the valley), proudly affiliated with a company renowned for its vanguard interlocking efficiency, Ford's men tended to treat Brazilians as instruments. And called them such. Matt Mulrooney gave his workers nicknames. "This fellow I had named Telephone. When I wanted to send a message or an order down front, I'd just holler, 'Telephone!' and he'd show up."
And they used themselves as standards to measure the value of Brazilian labor. "Two of our people easily carried some timbers which twelve Brazilians did not seem to be able to handle," observed a Dearborn official at the end of 1930. What a man could do in a Dearborn day "would take one of them guys three days to do it down there."
These American managers and foremen did, after all, work for a man whose obsession with time long predated his drive to root out "lost motion" and "slack" in the workday by dividing the labor needed to build the Model T into ever smaller tasks: 7,882 to be exact, according to Ford's own calculations. As a boy, Ford regularly took apart and reassembled watches and clocks. "Every clock in the Ford home," a neighbor once recalled, "shuddered when it saw him coming." He even invented a two-faced watch, one to keep "sun time" and the other Chicago time — that is, central standard time. Thirteen when his mother died giving birth to her ninth child, Henry later described his home after her passing as "a watch without a mainspring."
He also knew that attempts to change the measure of time could lead to resistance — again, well before he met labor opposition to his assembly line speedup. He was twenty-two when, in 1885, most of Detroit refused to obey a municipal ordinance to promote the "unification of time," as the campaign to get the United States to accept the Greenwich meridian as the universal standard was called. "Considerable confusion" prevailed, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune, as Detroit "showed her usual conservatism in refusing to adopt Standard Time." It took more than two decades to get the city to fully "abandon solar time" and set its clocks back twenty-eight minutes and fifty-one seconds to harmonize with Chicago and the rest of the Midwest (the city would switch to eastern standard time in 1915, both to have more sunlight hours and to synchronize the city's factories with New York banks).
In Fordlandia, industrial regimentation entailed a host of other initiatives besides whistles and punch card clocks. The paying of set bimonthly wages, based on those punched cards, was the most obvious. So was a conception of the workday that made as little concession as possible to the weather, keeping workers "on the clock" when rain poured down in sheets and the temperature soared past 105 degrees. The effort to rationalize life reached into the smallest details of a worker's day. As in Dearborn, plantation employees were required to wear a metal Ford badge, embossed with their ID number and an industrial panorama that included a factory complex, an airplane, two ships (the Ormoc and Farge?), and a water tower. The fieldhands who cleared the jungle and tended to the young rubber trees often took off their shirts in the heat, and so they pinned their badges to their belt buckles. The cost of a lost badge was deducted from wages.
It took Dearborn's purchasing agents some effort to find a factory whistle that wouldn't rust from the jungle humidity. Once they did, they shipped it to Fordlandia, where it was perched on top of the water tower, above the tall trees, giving it a seven-mile range. The whistle was piercing enough not only to reach dispersed road gangs and fieldhands but to be heard across the river, where even those not affiliated with Fordlandia began to pace their day to its regularly scheduled blows. The whistle was supplemented by another icon of industrial factory work: pendulum punch time clocks, placed at different locations around the plantation, that recorded exactly when each employee began and ended his workday.
Sponsor Message
In Detroit, immigrant workers by the time they got to Ford's factories, even if they were peasants and shepherds, had had ample opportunity to adjust to the meter of industrial life. The long lines at Ellis Island, the clocks that hung on the walls of depots and waiting rooms, the fairly precise schedules of ships and trains, and standardized time that chopped the sun's daily arc into zones combined to guide their motions and change their inner sense of how the days passed.
But in the Amazon, the transition between agricultural time and industrial time was much more precipitous. Prior to showing up at Fordlandia, many of the plantation's workers who had lived in the region had set their pace by two distinct yet complementary timepieces. The first was the sun, its rise and fall marking the beginning and end of the day, its apex signaling the time to take to the shade and sleep. The second was the turn of the seasons: most of the labor needed to survive was performed during the relatively dry months of June to November. Rainless days made rubber tapping possible, while the recession of the floods exposed newly enriched soils, ready to plant, and concentrated fish, making them easier to catch. But nothing was set in stone. Excessive rain or prolonged periods of drought or heat led to adjustments of schedules. Before the coming of Ford, Tapajos workers lived time, they didn't measure it — most rarely ever heard church bells, much less a factory whistle. It was difficult, therefore, as David Riker, who performed many jobs for Ford, including labor recruiter, said, "to make 365-day machines out of these people."
In 1927, Henry Ford bought a tract of land stretching twice the size of Deleware in the Amazonian jungle of Brazil. Fordlandia, as it was called, was meant to be a large rubber plantation.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Ford executives stand on the deck of the Lake Ormoc. Left to right: William Cowling, Edsel Ford, Einar Oxholm, Henry Ford, Pete Martin, Charles Sorensen, and AlbertWibel.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Workers chop down a tree in Fordlandia. Greg Grandin, author of "Fordlandia," claims that the complex ecological conditions and a clash of cultures between the Americans and native workers ultimately led to the failure of the project.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Along with the construction of the rubber plantation, Ford also created small American towns that included central squares, indoor plumbing, golf courses and hospitals.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Many of the plantation workers were to the jungle and were moved into American style housing.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
This family bungalow was part of a housing development styled after American homes.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Attempting to import American culture into the Amazon, Fordlandia offered residents a dance hall, with a movie screen on the back wall.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Malaria, yellow fever and viper bites claimed the lives of many workers.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Mundurucu mission children stand with German nuns.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
The American cars were no match for the local environment.
Courtesy of The Collections of the Henry Ford
Fordlandia's sawmill at Iron Mountain still stands 80 years later.
1 OF 11
Fordlandia's managers and foremen, in contrast, were mostly engineers, precise in their measurement of time and motion. One of the first things the Americans did was set their watches and clocks to Detroit time, where Fordlandia remains to this day (nearby Santarem runs an hour earlier). They scratched their heads when confronted with workers they routinely described as "lazy." Archie Weeks's daughter remembers her father throwing his straw hat on the ground more than once in frustration. With a decided sense of purpose that grated against the established rhythms of Tapajos life (David Riker liked to say that hurry was an "obscene" word in the valley), proudly affiliated with a company renowned for its vanguard interlocking efficiency, Ford's men tended to treat Brazilians as instruments. And called them such. Matt Mulrooney gave his workers nicknames. "This fellow I had named Telephone. When I wanted to send a message or an order down front, I'd just holler, 'Telephone!' and he'd show up."
And they used themselves as standards to measure the value of Brazilian labor. "Two of our people easily carried some timbers which twelve Brazilians did not seem to be able to handle," observed a Dearborn official at the end of 1930. What a man could do in a Dearborn day "would take one of them guys three days to do it down there."
These American managers and foremen did, after all, work for a man whose obsession with time long predated his drive to root out "lost motion" and "slack" in the workday by dividing the labor needed to build the Model T into ever smaller tasks: 7,882 to be exact, according to Ford's own calculations. As a boy, Ford regularly took apart and reassembled watches and clocks. "Every clock in the Ford home," a neighbor once recalled, "shuddered when it saw him coming." He even invented a two-faced watch, one to keep "sun time" and the other Chicago time — that is, central standard time. Thirteen when his mother died giving birth to her ninth child, Henry later described his home after her passing as "a watch without a mainspring."
He also knew that attempts to change the measure of time could lead to resistance — again, well before he met labor opposition to his assembly line speedup. He was twenty-two when, in 1885, most of Detroit refused to obey a municipal ordinance to promote the "unification of time," as the campaign to get the United States to accept the Greenwich meridian as the universal standard was called. "Considerable confusion" prevailed, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune, as Detroit "showed her usual conservatism in refusing to adopt Standard Time." It took more than two decades to get the city to fully "abandon solar time" and set its clocks back twenty-eight minutes and fifty-one seconds to harmonize with Chicago and the rest of the Midwest (the city would switch to eastern standard time in 1915, both to have more sunlight hours and to synchronize the city's factories with New York banks).
In Fordlandia, industrial regimentation entailed a host of other initiatives besides whistles and punch card clocks. The paying of set bimonthly wages, based on those punched cards, was the most obvious. So was a conception of the workday that made as little concession as possible to the weather, keeping workers "on the clock" when rain poured down in sheets and the temperature soared past 105 degrees. The effort to rationalize life reached into the smallest details of a worker's day. As in Dearborn, plantation employees were required to wear a metal Ford badge, embossed with their ID number and an industrial panorama that included a factory complex, an airplane, two ships (the Ormoc and Farge?), and a water tower. The fieldhands who cleared the jungle and tended to the young rubber trees often took off their shirts in the heat, and so they pinned their badges to their belt buckles. The cost of a lost badge was deducted from wages.
Jeffrey Rubard
Sep 23, 2023, 4:10:38 PM9/23/23
to
Maybe that's true, really.
Jeffrey Rubard
Sep 24, 2023, 11:34:33 AM9/24/23
to
Right. So it'd be 'practically irrational' to stake something on it, etc.
Jeffrey Rubard
Oct 1, 2023, 11:27:50 AM10/1/23
to
Maybe that's *just generally good advice*?
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 14, 2023, 3:30:58 PM12/14/23
to
"That seems like a long time ago."
Why, it was.
"I meant when the Greg Grandin book was published."
That too. #staycurrent
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 15, 2023, 11:24:35 AM12/15/23
to
That seems intelligent.
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 16, 2023, 11:38:52 AM12/16/23
to
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 16, 2023, 5:02:58 PM12/16/23
to
Are you comfortable with the existence of *some* objective, actual matters of fact?
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 19, 2023, 5:45:14 PM12/19/23
to
I meant more like 'Today is Tuesday' stuff?
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 30, 2024, 12:01:01 PMJan 30
to
"I think this is more interesting to you than to people in general."
That very well really could be, yes.
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 31, 2024, 11:37:18 AMJan 31
to
"Maybe you really made it all up, huh?"
I didn't make the country of Brazil up. #ivebeentothisplacebefore
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 2, 2024, 3:17:12 PMFeb 2
to
Do you know that you can't "play everything backwards", in a somewhat modern turn of phrase?
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 4, 2024, 12:19:09 PMFeb 4
to
Did I 'make up' the country of Brazil?
"Hah... no."
So not everything is 'total bullshit', huh?
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 4, 2024, 5:01:01 PMFeb 4
to
It's a simple example where the standard of 'relevance' of your discourse is low. That
kind of 'realism' where figurative or partly figurative speech is 'normal' is welcome when
it comes to talking about it, sort of notably. Still, there's such things as 'made up' and 'not made up'.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 6, 2024, 12:05:42 PMFeb 6
to
"Wow, that's folksy."
Garbage is garbage, guys.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 8, 2024, 11:26:34 AMFeb 8
to
"Did you not make Bolsonaro up, too?"
Sometimes you want to keep a 'civil tongue', guys.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 8, 2024, 3:09:22 PMFeb 8
to
I suppose his 68 years have brought to him whatever they have, yes.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 9, 2024, 11:46:59 AMFeb 9
to
"As opposed to..."
No, you 'realistically' think that the 16,000-odd days of my life have been composed of 24-hour periods such that I...
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 9, 2024, 3:57:04 PMFeb 9
to
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 10, 2024, 12:14:42 PMFeb 10
to
Not everyone 'obscure' is 'unsung', you know?
"Oh... I know how that is. Leave me be, please."
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 10, 2024, 4:04:51 PMFeb 10
to
"Yeah, what this guy means is that that 'sum of days' numbered 16,200 or whatever amounts to 'so much good stuff' that you couldn't possibly hold a torch for him, and so on.
That part is believable, even if untrue; the 'reality's an illusion' people are far less to be trusted, by comparison."
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 11, 2024, 12:00:18 PMFeb 11
to
"What did you do?"
I wrote a lot of books. (They're always published using noms des plumes or 'pen-names', if you didn't know that. I have 'dozens' of them.)
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 11, 2024, 4:47:16 PMFeb 11
to
Thousands of them? One or two thousand?
"That's impossible?"
Do you think it's impossible if it in fact happened? Are you one of those "no va" types?
"Honestly, no."
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 13, 2024, 11:32:27 AMFeb 13
to
But it's, like, a Tuesday, right? You're not one of those vaporous idealists who thinks 'the world dances to your tune'?
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 14, 2024, 11:33:58 AMFeb 14
to
So there's 'actual facts', and the 'rational necessitation' of something like Wednesday following Tuesday?
"You imagine me pretty dense."
The people I meet are rather a little too 'sophisticated' about such things.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 16, 2024, 11:45:10 AMFeb 16
to
"So, how's Friday treating you?"
Do you ever think something is 'not up to you'?
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 16, 2024, 5:23:56 PMFeb 16
to
Compared to the deep, deep pools of murky and dangerous self-deception around 'I say what goes', it's pretty shallow.
Otherwise, it's Friday like Friday is Friday.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 17, 2024, 11:45:40 AMFeb 17
to
"Have you ever been to Brazil?"
No, I haven't been to Brazil.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 18, 2024, 12:03:07 PMFeb 18
to
I have. #faketwentyquestionsetc
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 20, 2024, 11:41:38 AMFeb 20
to
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 21, 2024, 11:33:20 AMFeb 21
to
"Really? You went to Canada? Cough."
I don't travel much, for various reasons.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 21, 2024, 7:03:40 PMFeb 21
to
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 22, 2024, 11:18:58 AMFeb 22
to
We're not really 'post-truth' in general, you know?
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