Henry Ford’s Ghost Town in the Amazon
September 22nd, 2006
Now primarily remembered for his dehumanizing assembly line and rampant anti-Semitism, Henry Ford was once the greatest example of the American business spirit; a stubborn, inventive, successful man tackling the world. With unlimited funds – and an unbridled ego – Ford would stop at nothing to destroy his rivals, be it labor unions, immigrants, or (in his most bizarre turn) the European rubber barons of the 1920s. For the latter, Henry Ford built a monument to his own insanity: a massive abandoned American town in the middle of Brazil.
Interested in crushing the Dutch-British monopoly on rubber from Southeast Asia, Henry Ford bought 10,000 sq. miles of rainforest and constructed Fordlandia – an all-American village complete with clapboard homes and Michigan-made sidewalks – in order to build the largest rubber plantation in the world. Completely absorbed in the American corporate world, he hired no botanists, assigned ID numbers to his native workers, and forced everyone to work 9 to 5 in the tropical sun. Within a year, Ford’s workers rioted, chasing their overlords into the forest with machetes, stopping production for three days.
Poor management and even poorer soil doomed the project from the start; by the time the city was abandoned in the 1940s, Ford had lost $20 million ($200 million in today’s money) and synthetic rubber made natural latex obsolete.
Today, Fordlandia sits in the heart of the Amazon, frequently by only a few farmers and the occasional tourist; a lonely example of American industrial hubris.
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