Henry Ford sought to control his rubber supply by building Fordlândia, a model community in the Amazon. But transplanting the American Dream to the rainforest proved illusory.

Back in 2008, a short documentary aired on Brazilian TV about Henry Ford’s urban Utopia in the Amazon shows an old inhabitant who returned to the US when the company sold the place, Charles Townsend, asking in Portuguese a group of local children: “Who here was born in Fordlândia?” A bunch of children raise their hands, cheering. “I was born in Fordlândia too!” —he replies.

It had started dazzlingly as if touched by an early Disney magic wand. In the mid-1920s, Ford decided to respond to the rising demand for rubber and create a model community in the Amazon basin to control its own rubber supply, an uplifted and prosperous version of the American Dream abroad that would pay off not only in rubber but also in prosperity for all. If successful, the new community could be replicated elsewhere (and, with it, Ford’s prospects to grow workers as customers).

Like an early version of Pleasantville or the Truman Show village (or Dearborn, outside Detroit) but in the middle of the rainforest, the town wanted it all: Roofing shingles, sanitation, manicured gardens, appliances —and strict moral regulations, forcing locals to eat food suited for work, which would proceed regularly with the independence of heat and weather conditions. It didn’t go as planned.

How did it all start, and what does this behavioral experiment from one century ago tell us about today?

A very particular kind of industrialist

Fordlândia wasn’t Henry Ford’s first difficult bet. He had created the biggest car company by inventing his own production method. He was already used to deploying strategies and waiting for them to materialize years later. This time around, it wouldn’t be different, he thought.

Born in 1863 in a family of Irish and English descent, Ford was raised amid the agrarian values of overcoming hardship through relentless work. He wasn’t fond of games or leisure, though he mastered strategy early on. Games requiring extensive planning—roleplaying, chess, strategy—attract a type of player who waits until the end to show their real strength before disclosing what they are up to.

A sleeper strategy maintains a low-profile, passive style that focuses on accumulating resources while unnoticed by rivals. Once they have built enough strength under the radar, they mobilize their stealth force by rapidly scaling, thus taking over before competitors even notice. Few people have applied these principles on a big scale, and their attempts have been deemed controversial. Like a good player, Ford understood the difference between purposeless hard work and hard work with a reward.

Separated one hundred years apart, middle age hit hard two controversial yet determining personalities in American business, Henry Ford (in his early fifties when his game-changing innovation, the assembly line, began to pay off at a big scale) and Elon Musk, who recently turned 53 and has risen concerns about his erratic behavior and excessive media exposure. Like Ford, Musk seems capable of deploying innovations that could turn out to be as consequential as the assembly line one century ago.

Contrary to the current narrative of tech geniuses blossoming early on, Ford was a late bloomer:

“Success came late to Ford. Born on a Michigan farm in 1863, he was forty years old when he founded the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, forty-five when he introduced the Model T, and fifty when he put assembly line production into place and began to pay workers a wage high enough to let them buy the product they themselves made.”

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, Greg Grandin (2010), p. 34

Ford in July of (19)24

Go back to the early summer of 1924. Henry Ford was already 60 and about to turn 61 on July 30. In just one decade, Ford Motor Company had managed to dominate the emergent automotive industry, mainly by ramping up production of its Model T, a veteran car launched in 1908. Thanks to its assembly line, the company had reached unprecedented economies of scale, bringing the car to the masses and getting a market share of around 60-70% in the US market. The car reached 10 million units in June 1924, ready for Ford to celebrate his birthday a few weeks later.

Allegedly, Henry Ford had enjoyed playing the underdog for years. Before the assembly line, automobiles were handcrafted by skilled workers, and their production cost made them prohibitive to most families. Ford wanted to change this but knew that a plan to do so would need a scale and investment never seen before.

Instead of settling with a small luxury shop and growing it conventionally by adding people essentially working the same way, he obsessed with improvements capable of yielding exponential growth: He took extensive notes of meatpacking plants in the US Midwest, where animal carcasses were cut into parts as they moved through a conveyor belt; he also noticed how much some industries were benefiting from interchangeable parts.

Could he move car parts along a conveyor belt and, through cadence and motion studies, free workers from errands and productivity differences by placing them along the line? The tests were lengthy and costly, making the factory waste time instead of getting any quantifiable advantage; moreover, workers—used to building a car and having an idea of the whole process—needed to adapt to a production concept where they didn’t need full expertise anymore but the ability to ace simple tasks repeatedly.

But, once inertia set the moving assembly concept in its perpetual motion, the automobile switched from being an artisanal luxury good to becoming the second most important purchase for all families after housing, a feat that still holds today. In a similarly bold and counterintuitive move, he raised wages (a bold $5-day, scandalous at the time) and offered discounts to turn workers into customers of what they were building.

The convinced behaviorist

Some of Ford’s ideas belonged to his time, when social engineering, behaviorism, and eugenics, and his innovation was perceived not only as an industrial achievement but as a new force for American industry —and people. Reverend Samuel Marquis, head of Ford’s employee relations, put it like this:

“The impression has somehow got around that Henry Ford is in the automobile business. It isn’t true. Mr. Ford shoots about fifteen hundred cars out of the back door of his factory every day just to get rid of them. They are the by-products of his real business, which is the making of men.”

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, Greg Grandin (2010), p. 34

Ford was also opinionated and stubborn regarding how people—especially his workers—should behave, live, and tend their houses. One decade later, Henry Ford would count himself among the group of prominent American personalities unequivocally cheering Nazism early on, along with aviator Charles Lindbergh (who also was an isolationist and America First promoter, cheering Nazi Germany before and during World War II and whom Philip Roth imagines as a right-wing populist president in The Plot Against America).

Like with Musk, with Ford, it’s impossible to differentiate the bold, brilliant industrialist from the controverted, thin-skinned public persona, unable to distinguish between worthy causes and schoolyard noise, and making psychoanalysts wonder what goes wrong as brilliant people (at least in their fields of expertise, that is) age. Though, to be fair, Ford was still in his early sixties when he helped disseminate false information about Jewish people, proving a tendency to embrace conspiracy theories —even when disproven by people near him.

Fighting cronyism

One hundred years ago, Ford’s industrialist brain wasn’t celebrating market dominance but preparing his company to meet with resilience the two trends that concerned him: The competition was about to get tougher as the two main rivals caught on, especially General Motors, which opted for offering more models and updates to make potential customers contrast Ford’s relative immutability with a growing set of fast-evolving rivals. (Any parallelism with Tesla’s EV market shrinking dominance as aging best-sellers have to compete with growing, highly subsidized competition in its main markets?)

The other concern is similar to the early Ford and Tesla’s strategy to corner the EV market early on —vertical integration. Ford pursued controlling as many aspects of production as it could, from most raw materials to finished cars. Like Musk, Henry Ford wanted to become the biggest force for automobile expansion worldwide. And, to do so, the company needed—or so he thought—to behave like an interventionist State, owning and operating rubber plantations, steel mills, and railroads to reduce dependency and raise profit margins.

On the surface, Ford was cruising on confidence and optimism in 1924, perhaps the height of its industrial and commercial power. It played with the advantage of being the first to integrate innovative production techniques and a strong sales department, which led to a dominant market position when the automobile market finally exploded in America.

In the background, however, Henry Ford was uneasy with the influence over his business (and the world) that the colonial world created by Europeans still had. It directly affected car production, as rubber production, a critical raw material extracted from trees in plantations that had started in Brazil but had been successfully replicated by the British in Southeast Asia, acted like a cartel, with London controlling production and prices much in the fashion that OPEC got to manage oil after the colonial era.

Ford was especially outraged by the Stevenson Plan, established by the British government to regulate rubber prices by introducing export quotas and restricting the amount of rubber that could leave British territory. In a move that seems to mimic Musk’s perspective on raw materials affecting EV production, Henry Ford sought to reduce dependency by accelerating research to create natural rubber substitutes and by literally buying a big lot of territory in Brazil near Manaus, the rubber capital of the country that was suffering from Southeast competition, to engineer a Midwest-style American city in the middle of the jungle —and produce cheap Ford rubber in exchange.

Agriculture and industry

When it opened in 1928, the enclave, a utopian company town Ford saw as an experiment to export American prosperity to like-minded world regions, would be named Fordlândia. Not much later, the Great Depression would transform the American economy and affect the company’s commercial prospects, and the new contingencies really affected the company’s plans to control the supply chain and production worldwide. The city went on nonetheless.

Loyal to his farm upbringing, Ford tried first to put “one foot in agriculture, one foot in industry” to modernize Michigan’s sparsely populated Upper Peninsula, which relied on mining and timber; he would end up building Alberta, a model village where the population was expected to divide their activity lumbering, milling, and farming. On the one hand, he quoted Emerson’s Self-Reliance essay and declared himself a representative of American industriousness and stamina; on the other, he was planning for an urban, industrial world around prosperous suburban areas that people would reach by car. Yet he soon realized that even close to home, from remote Michigan to his plans to build a mega-city by taking over Muscle Shoals in Alabama to create a large industrial complex powered by hydropower from the Wilson Dam —a city 65 miles long with virtually free electricity supplied by the dammed Tennessee river rapids. The US government refused Ford’s offer.

When Henry Ford discussed the rubber cartel with Harvey Firestone, they decided to look into what looked like a long-shot idea: Building in the Amazon what didn’t seem to have worked in Michigan or Alabama. Yet his talks with Brazilian representatives looked promising enough; he admired the Brazilian consul in New York he was introduced to, a “paulista” (cosmopolitan from São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city and business center), and decided to give the Amazon basin a shot. He still had in mind the impression that ex-president Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt’s journey down the mighty river had caused in him years back.

“He asked the Brazilian about the wages rubber tappers received. Thirty-six to fifty cents a day, de Lima answered; Ford replied that he had ‘no doubt that he would pay up to five dollars a day for a good worker.’ Brazilians, he said, had the right to work as ‘free men,” not as “slaves.’ His principal concern was not the number of hours he got for his wages but the productivity of the labor force.”

(…)

“‘There will be schools,’ Ford said of his plans for the Amazon,’ experiment stations, canteens, stores, amusement parks, cinemas, athletic sports, hospitals, etc. for the comfort and happiness of those who work on the plantation.”

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, Greg Grandin (2010), p. 81-82

A land grant in the middle of the Amazon

Ford had powerful allies in Brazil to carry on his idea, among them Jorge Dumont Villares, heir of a coffee-growing family from São Paulo; Dumont Villares wanted to revive the Amazon’s rubber plantations and had studied to do so from Belém, the capital city from the Amazonian state of Pará and the biggest port in Brazil at the time, albeit its importance declined once Britain learned to grow rubber in Asia. With his complicity and that of William Schurz, Washington’s commercial attaché in Rio, Ford took on the responsibility of ending American dependency on British rubber, much in the fashion SpaceX has reignited the Space race and created the commercial opportunity of reusable rockets and satellite launches.

The goal wasn’t simply to ship cheap latex back to Detroit but to finally build his vision of the ideal city. Fordândia needed to be the example of what the world could become —if only it adapted to his plans. However, by the time the works were to start, rubber markets began to loosen, and the investment became more difficult to justify. Business intermediaries and local politicians make more expensive land grant that Ford could have bought for next to nothing —a 5,625 square-mile property along the Tapajós River, a tributary of the Amazon. It would host the new city upon a hill to illuminate South America and beyond.

Ford was interested in the prospects of a property twice the size of Delaware. Still, his initial intention was to create an American enclave in Brazil, not to learn about the reality of the Amazon. In the 1920s, international business wasn’t carried out trying to understand local sensitivities, culture, or social norms, and the chosen enclave was more connected to the early ethnographic studies by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss than the etiquette at São Paulo or Rio. A true frontier between natives and local populations attracted by the prospects and culture of the Brazilian state.

Grandiose ideas aside, the place was so remote that it was an adventure just to get to it. Fordlândia needed to be on an elevated area to protect it from eventual flooding and the cargo vessels carrying materials during the rainy season. When they finally arrived in early 1929, Norwegian-born Einar Oxholm marked a grid resembling any American would-be metropolis, with an area for American workers (Vila Americana), which had running water and modern sanitation, and a peripheral area served by wells.

Fordlândia’s short-lived superficial prosperity

Despite its remoteness, Fordlândia was called to set an example for the whole region: The project included hospitals, schools, generators, a sawmill, and a water tower. Soon, the managerial idea of setting up a virtuous stronghold in the middle of the biggest tropical rainforest on earth proved difficult, especially when locals saw that the enclave was trying to set up rules detached from any local supervision, including alcohol, women, tobacco, or sports.

Several managers tried to run the city by avoiding local authorities as much as possible. A concealed cast system emerged between Americans and transplanted Europeans on one side and locals on the other. On December 20, 1930, the schism between skilled and manual workers caused violent riots that destroyed key equipment. Locals disapproved of the town’s paternalizing strategy toward them, especially when they realized that American managers would keep visiting all houses to check how organized they were and enforce behavioral rules.

A new manager at Fordlândia, Archibald Johnson, finally got hold of the situation and the city achieved the superficial aspect of any American would-be boomtown. He managed to turn the situation around after the riots, paving roads, finishing many houses, and opening entertainment facilities directly imported from the US. Ford kept insisting on the community’s lifestyle, and his ideas led him to impose a diet, corner alcohol consumption, and import gardening techniques that had little to do with the town’s tropical environment.

A new population, Belterra, grew in the flats of the land grant, and the town looked “like a squared midwestern population.”

“Model Ts and As rolled down its straight streets, which were lined with fire hydrants, sidewalks, streetlamps, and white-and-green worker bungalows, with neat lawns and front gardens.”

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, Greg Grandin (2010), p. 321

Overwhelmed by the jungle’s lack of remorse

In late 1936, Belterra was in a finer shape than Fordlândia. Its tree nursery had over 5 million seedlings to serve as rootstock and planted 700,000 trees, though they were still mainly Southeast Asian stock instead of more suitable local seedlings.

Soon, bugs took over in a frenzy that Werner Herzog would recognize from 1981 when he got stuck in the middle of the jungle trying to produce the movie Fitzcarraldo (a movie about a would-be rubber baron) and had to wait in despair, while slowly moving a 320-ton steamship over a hill amid deaths, injuries, and accusations of exploitation.

Little by little, the project fell from Henry Ford’s priorities. The model city in the middle of the jungle, the American-style community in the Amazon, complete with amenities and prosperity, couldn’t create a transplanted Puritan enclave out of local workers, some of whom dealt with similar discrimination in Brazil as that experienced by North American natives.

The area’s soil proved unsuited for a rubber plantation. Several years on, Fordlândia, the would-be rubber city in the middle of the Amazon, had little rubber to offer and was so far away from any major connected railway or harbor, that the enterprise proved expensive: The land was hilly, infertile, and trees were planted so close together that plagues and diseases prevented any progress—like a tale of revenge of nature against extractive rationalism narrated by young Werner Herzog, tree blight, ants, lace bugs, caterpillars and humidity worked rapidly to return the area to the rainforest.

Like the community itself, the plantations suffered from a conceptual problem at the foundations of the whole project —a lack of local knowledge and no predisposition to learn from the knowledge at hand to maximize agroforestry practices applied to a tropical rainforest. The forest clearance took place during the rainy season, and the rubber trees never got a chance to overcome a parasite infestation amplified by poor management.

The place, designed to offer a lifeline to the American industry, had become a burden to its biggest car manufacturer right when General Motors and Chrysler were catching up and the consequences of the Great Depression were about to hit. Henry Ford’s age—and the US role in World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor—made him and his ideas an uncomfortable legacy right when his company was successfully leading the war effort against the Axis powers and profiting from it.

When the Americans left

He was 82 by the time the war ended, and the world’s public opinion had to deal with a fact that, according to Albert Camus, had changed Western aspiration to humanism and civilization values forever —unbearable details about the Holocaust, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“We can sum it up in one sentence: our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.”

Albert Camus, Between Hell and Reason, August 8, 1945 (editorial at Combat, the French Resistance newspaper)

Right when the Soviet Union advanced through Germany and conquered Berlin, committing retaliatory atrocities and the world was heading for the Cold War, trying to settle, according to Camus, between Hell and Reason, the old industrialist ceded his baton and his grandson, Henry Ford II, quickly cut ties with ballooning costs and questioning investments.

“When the Ford Motor Company abandoned its Amazon holdings in November 1945, many of its workers didn’t know the Americans were leaving until the day they boarded ship and embarked down the Tapajós. ‘Goodbye, we’re going back to Michigan,’ said the wife of Fordlândia’s last manager to her nanny, América Lobato. ‘They didn’t take anything with them, they just left, like that,’ Lobato recalled.”

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, Greg Grandin (2010), p. 353

2024 is 1924 all over again

Interestingly, World War II accelerated innovation regarding synthetic rubber. A US-led joint effort had begun developing a massive synthetic rubber program in 1942 thanks to the collaboration of the automakers and producers like Firestone, Goodyear, BF Goodrich, and US Rubber. However, commercial production didn’t ramp up until the Japanese occupation blocked traditional routes from Southeast Asia.

“But though Belterra’s twice-grafted trees were running sap, they couldn’t compete with the low-cost latex that was flooding the world market following Japan’s defeat in the war. America’s revived auto industry was either buying its rubber from recaptured Malaysian, Indonesian, and Vietnamese plantations or synthesizing it from petroleum, now affordable as a result of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1945 deal with King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, who traded military protection for the cheap oil that fueled America’s postwar economic expansion.”

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, Greg Grandin (2010), p. 354

Suddenly, Fordlândia looked like a poorly executed behavioral experiment to bring civilization to the remote rainforest. Ford II sold the big property to Brazil at a fraction of the project’s total cost, and all American residents decided to head back home.

At the peak of his influence when he was in his fifties and early sixties, Henry Ford diverted much focus from company matters to publicly offer himself to fix all sorts of social malaises, including promises of a new era shaped by large-scale projects that failed to materialize once the real cost and complexities were apparent.

Henry Ford and Elon Musk matured as innovative visionaries that had accelerated their combustion engine and EV auto industries; they both fought to achieve vertical integration and strategic control of key elements of their supply chain and proprietary knowledge.

They both also share a tendency to believe that their professional achievements can be translated to anything outside their areas of expertise. Like Musk, Ford believed that technology could transform societies for the better and also seemed to think that their autocratic management style and high-risk experiments were one quick way to shake things around. Also, like Musk, he wasn’t interested in managing the externalities of big decisions.

Teslandia

As Tesla’s Share of the US electric car market Falls Below 50% and scrutiny increases around his excessive and erratic public exposure (making his most loyal customers uncomfortable by convincing them that they now drive a gigantic red cap on wheels instead of a fine, environmentally friendly car), Tesla’s next moves could make or break a market that has to expand beyond early adopters. There was a time when people didn’t know—nor cared to know—about company moguls’ most unhinged ideas.

One hundred years after Henry Ford’s peak of influence, Elon Musk faces similar dilemmas. He seems to gravitate towards the weaker, sometimes unhinged sides of Ford himself, Howard Hughes, or John DeLorean instead of staying with the many things to learn from their boldness (and personal and professional failures).

Suppose tariffs on the more competitive Chinese EV cars remain. In that case, Tesla will continue to face a decline in its image (Musk’s conspiratorial commentary appeals to a public that often opposes the adoption of EV cars, while his biggest market—California—is now the main target of his diatribes) and more competition from Japanese, European, and South Korean competitors. At home, Rivian just eased its cash flow with a strategic partnership with German automaker Volkswagen and could attract some customers who are growing uneasy with Tesla’s perceived politicization.

The best way to emulate Henry Ford’s industrialist side is to acknowledge how weak or plain wrong most of his social and behavioral ideas were. Projects like Fordlândia wanted to improve the world but failed to recognize local idiosyncrasies or agroforestry basics, from soil composition to planting techniques.

Elon Musk is supposed to propel Texas to a new era of prosperity, sometimes offering bold plans that sound, for good and bad, like an EV-era Fordlândia. He should also stick with his industrialist side and leave the commentary around things he knows little to nothing about (he only will need to ask people who care about him, excluding sycophants). That way, he’ll have more time to explore the many things he has accelerated for the benefit of all.