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.
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