Grandin Fordlandia: The Rise and
Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City Metropolitan Books, a division
of Henry Holt and Company
Video from the 2009 National
Book Awards Finalist Reading
Photo credit: Manu
Fordlandia is a fascinating
account of what happens when hubris mixes with naiveté
and good intentions in the Amazonian jungle. Grandin
is a gifted historian and master storyteller, who successfully
brings to life the tragic story of Henry Ford’s
attempt to create his own rubber kingdom in Brazil.
More than a half a century after the last American abandoned
Fordlandia to Nature’s embrace, there are still
many truths and lessons to be gleaned from Ford’s
failed experiment in benign imperialism.
ABOUT THE BOOK
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, and, of course,
Model Ts. Instead, the settlement quickly became the
site of an epic clash.
a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that
the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg
Grandin shows, Ford’s great delusion was not that
the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism,
once released, might yet be contained.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Greg Grandin is the author
of Empire’s Workshop, The Last Colonial Massacre,
and the award-winning The Blood of Guatemala.
A professor of history of Latin American history at
New York University and a Guggenheim fellow, Grandin
has served on the United Nations Truth Commission investigating
the Guatemalan Civil War and has written for the
Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Statesman,
and The New York Times.
Grandin received his BA from
Brooklyn College, CUNY, in 1992 and his PhD from Yale
in 1999. His many books and articles explore the connection
between the diverse manifestations of everyday life
and large-scale societal transformations that took place
in Central and South America related to agricultural
commodity production and state formation in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries.
Grandin has published extensively
on issues of revolution, popular memory, U.S.–Latin
American relations, photography, genocide, truth commissions,
human rights, disease, and the tensions that exist between
legal and historical inquiries into political violence.
In 1997 and 1998 Grandin worked with the Guatemalan
Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico—the
UN-administered truth commission set up to investigate
political violence committed during Guatemala’s
thirty-six-year civil war.
January 9, 1928: Henry Ford
was in a spirited mood as he toured the Ford Industrial
Exhibit with his son, Edsel, and his aging friend
Thomas Edison, feigning fright at the flash of news
cameras as a circle of police officers held back admirers
and reporters. The event was held in New York, to
showcase the new Model A. Until recently, nearly half
of all the cars produced in the world were Model Ts,
which Ford had been building since 1908. But by 1927
the T’s market share had dropped considerably.
A half decade of prosperity and cheap credit had increased
demand for stylized, more luxurious cars. General
Motors gave customers dozens of lacquer colors and
a range of upholstery options to choose from while
the Ford car came in green, red, blue, and black—
which at least was more variety than a few years earlier
when Ford reportedly told his customers they could
have their car in any color they wanted, "so
long as it’s black."
From May 1927, when the Ford
Motor Company stopped production on the T, to October,
when the first Model A was assembled, many doubted
that Ford could pull off the changeover. It was costing
a fortune, estimated by one historian at $250 million,
because the internal workings of the just- opened
River Rouge factory, which had been designed to roll
out Ts into the indefinite future, had to be refitted
to make the A. Yet on the first two days of its debut,
over ten million Americans visited their local Ford
dealers to inspect the new car, available in a range
of body types and colors including Arabian Sand, Rose
Beige, and Andalusite Blue. Within a few months, the
company had received over 700,000 orders for the A,
and even Ford’s detractors had to admit that
he had staged a remarkable comeback.