Fordlandia
How Henry Ford tried to make a monument to himself
Actually an idyllic sight: “Fordlandia” in the Brazilian jungle
© A.PAES / Shutterstock.com
With “Fordlandia”, automobile magnate Henry Ford tried to stamp a city out of the jungle floor according to his ideas – without success.
Some, like Donald Trump with his “Trump Tower” in New York named after him, set a monument for themselves in the middle of the city. Others, like automobile tycoon Henry Ford, tried their luck in the deepest jungle: Fordlandia was an ambitious project that failed grandly.
It was to become a flourishing city in the jungle of Brazil: Fordlandia turned out to be a $ 25 million grave in the end. But at first everything started out very promising. In the 1920s, the Ford Motor Company acquired 10,000 square kilometers of land on the Rio Tapajós in Amazonia. They wanted to build a rubber plantation there and thus obtain raw material for car tires, windshield wipers and the like, which would then be built into Ford’s automobiles – as far as the plan.
Henry Ford approached the construction of the city with a good dose of naivety: he renounced experts and tried to impose the American way of life on the local workers who were supposed to live there: You couldn’t get used to the model of the time clock, and that was what it was American cuisine was not well received. All the displeasure ultimately culminated in an uprising that was put down by the Brazilian military.
Walt Disney made the commercial “The Amazon awakens”
Nothing came of rubber extraction through the rubber plantation either. The trees were planted too densely and eventually attacked by pests and fungi. Except for a few individual samples, no significant quantities could be obtained. Over time, investors became impatient and began to withdraw their support for the “Fordlandia” project.
After Henry Ford’s son sold the city to Brazilians for a symbolic sandwich, all that remains of the paved streets, schools and grocery stores are ruins. Neither the few residents nor the advertising film made by Walt Disney could do that “The Amazon awakens” something different.