12-U3D1 -What situations have you personally encountered that are analogous to isolationism? To inclusionism? Contrast the results of these experiences. If such experiences are outside of your personal experience, use examples from literature. SEE DETAILS
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References
Dempsey, M. A. (1996). Henry Ford's Amazonian suburbia. Americas , 48 (2), 44.
HENRY FORD'S AMAZONIAN SUBURBIA
The lazy towns of Belterra and Forlandia are all that
remain of this auto tycoon's Brazilian venture
in rubber production
Belterra sits like a Great Lakes resort, perched above a stretch of sandy beach overlooked by
white wooden cottages with green shutters. Wicker chairs rest on verandas, flowers burst
from the tidy lawns, and magnificent pines lend aromatic shade. Six decades ago, people
here square danced at parties and listened to the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But
Belterra, built to look like the Great Lakes towns loved by auto pioneer Henry Ford, sits
smack in the Brazilian Amazon.
Long gone are the outdoor movie screens that, half a century ago, brought scratchy
Hollywood films to workers slashing rubber trees 150 miles south of the equator. Fire
hydrants stamped by a Michigan manufacturer still dot the concrete sidewalks. Residents of
the sleepy town no longer remember where the library sat, but they point to a weedchoked
field as the former nine-hole golf course. More than half a century ago, Model T Fords rolled
down these streets and, on a rare occasion, the hospital dispatched its ambulance. Today
Volkswagens sit in carports. Belterra and its sister city, Fordlandia, so deep in the rainforest that it is accessible only by
boat, are all that is left of Ford's dream of becoming a robber baron.
In the early 1900s, Brazilian robber was used in Model T Ford tires, but the quality was
uneven. Better latex came from Asia, where plantations started with Brazilian seeds
flourished because they had no natural pests. Some historians say Ford turned to Brazil to
break a British-Dutch cartel that held prices high. Others say he simply bristled at importing
rubber from halfway around the globe when it thrived in the Americas.
As early as 1923, the U.S. government began surveying Venezuela, Brazil, and spots in
Central America to evaluate their potential as rubber sources. A government report by Carl
LaRue, a University of Michigan botanist, gave high marks to a plot of land in Brazil near
where the Tapajos River dumps its clear waters into the chocolate Amazon. The report ended
up in Ford's hands.
Brazilian authorities, hopeful that the auto pioneer could spark another rubber boom like the
one that fueled the massive country's economy in the 1800s, granted him 2.5 million acres
deep in the Amazon, police protection, and duty-free entry of all Ford equipment and
supplies. In exchange for the free land, Ford promised to return 9 percent of the plantation's
profits to the local and national governments after twelve years. The 1927 pact marked the
first plantation attempt in Brazil, where previously only wild rubber had been tapped, and
opened the way for what Ford envisioned as an agro-industrial utopia of workers with "one
foot in industry and one foot on the land."
In August 1928 the steamer Lake Ormoc pulling the barge Lake LaFarge--and carrying the
infrastructure of a small city--left Dearborn, Michigan, the U.S. headquarters then and now for
Ford's auto operations. Four months Later, it docked ninety miles upstream from Santarem,
Brazil, where hundreds of people working shifts around the clock cleared a patch on a murky,
malarial shore of the Tapajos.
Ford officials lived on the Lake Ormoc while workers unloaded motor boats, a steam shovel, a
pile driver, tractors, stump pullers, a locomotive, ice-making machines, and crates of food,
along with prefabricated buildings, the components of a powerhouse, and a disassembled
sawmill. With the equipment, Ford's new firm, the Companhia Industrial do Brasil, was born.
The hilly riverbank once dubbed Boa Vista, or good view was rechristened Fordlandia
Fenced in by jungle, Fordlandia epitomized modern U.S. suburbia, with rows of snug
bungalows fed by power lines running to a diesel generator. Ford rubber workers received
double the local hourly wage plus free housing, medical care, and food. Their main street was
paved, and they collected well water from spigots. in front of their homes. The U.S. staff and
white-collar Brazilian workers had running water in their houses.
On weekends, the North Americans at Fordlandia splashed in one outdoor swimming pool;
Brazilians escaped the sun by sliding into another. The "Villa Brasileira" area boasted tailors,
shops, restaurants, and shoemakers. The aroma of fresh bread wafted from a bakery, and the butcher shop offered beef, pork, and chicken at subsidized prices. It sounded like a
dream--but only on paper.
Fordlandia's uneven terrain eroded, making it costly and slow to operate tractors. Stagnant
water collected in low spots, breeding malaria-carrying mosquitoes. During the dry season,
from July to November, the Tapajos dropped as much as forty feet, leaving the dock too low
for boats to approach. Humid temperatures pushing the mercury Into the nineties were
intolerable for the transplanted Michigan managers. Ants, moths, mites, and leaf disease
attacked the trees.
The initial years at Fordlandia were also marked by labor problems and cost overruns. The
plantation manager job changed hands four times from 1928 to 1930. Some researchers
claim the plantation failed because horticulturists were eschewed in favor of factory-trained
supervisors, who planted trees in orderly rows rather than clumps as they grew in the wild,
robbing them of protection from the hard rains and baking sun. Even when 1.4 million trees
were planted in symmetrical rows, 340 workers appeared on the regular payroll, and students
were enrolled at three schools, Fordlandia was a flop.
But the auto manufacturer refused to give up. In 1934, the Companhia Industrial do Brasil
swapped part of the concession for 703,750 acres fifty miles further north along the Tapajos
and the second Ford plantation complex, Belterra, was added to the jungle map. Although
Fordlandia continued operating with a reduced staff, Ford officials designed Belterra to
correct the blunders of its predecessor. Yet problems persisted.
"It was not a money-making enterprise. . . . Rubber production didn't even begin to satisfy
their needs," says Steven Alexander, owner of Santarem's Amazon Turismo travel agency
and a history buff who has spent extensive tune interviewing local residents about Fordlandia
and Belterra. "When Ford started looking at Brazil in 1927, he was already producing one
million cars a year."
"LaRue picked the wrong place," says Emerick Szilagyi, a now-retired U.S. surgeon who ran
the plantation hospital at Belterra, which he describes as "the Mayo Clinic of the Amazon,"
from 1942 to 1945. Szilagyi shared a spacious bungalow with three other bachelors in the
North American section of Belterra, near the homes of Brazilian engineers but uphill from the
men's dormitories and small family homes of the rubber workers. The enchanting view from
that house even today belies the problems that plagued the plantations.
Szilagyi, one of the few Belterra officials still living, had been awaiting wartime orders when
superiors at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan, asked him to replace Dr. Kenneth
Waddell at the Brazilian plantations. Waddell was assigned to manage an Amazon sanitation
project jointly nm by the U.S. military and the Brazilian government to boost the health of
rubber workers and, in turn, rubber output in the Amazon.
"It was unquestionably the most interesting time of my life," says Szilagyi, a multilingual native
of Hungary who became a pioneer in cardiovascular surgery after he returned to the United States. When the thirty-year-old Szllagyi first reached Belterra, he found a fully equipped
medical facility and rubber workers who had never seen a doctor before.
During the 1930s and 1940s, boats and a horse trail were the only links between Belterra and
the ten thou-sand-resident Amazon port of Santarem, nearly forty miles away. Today the
plantation is reached after a two-hour truck ride over rutted roads that pass palm huts with dirt
floors and patchy fields of black pepper, as barefoot children play by the road. At Belterra, the
scenery changes dramatically: Sidewalks line the streets and power lines hang from poles.
Paint peels from vacant industrial buildings, but the evenly spaced bungalows are well-kept
and line the dusty main street with a symmetry foreign to the Amazon.
Windows still sport screens, just one of the northern customs transported to Fordlandia and
Belterra. The first U.S. doctor at the Fordlandia medical center attempted to eradicate malaria
and hookworm among Brazilian seringueiros, or rubber gatherers, by distributing quinine and
shoes. The quinine was accepted, but the seringueiros refused to trade their sandals for
shoes. The jungle dwellers also found Fordlandia's two-family homes hopelessly hot and ugly
and the idea of indoor bathrooms repulsive.
At the same time, Ford's 6 A.M. to 3 P.M. work schedule was unpopular with seringueiros
accustomed to slashing trees several hours before dawn then resuming the work at sunset.
But the promise of free housing and food, health care for the workers and their families, and a
salary of thirty-seven cents a day--double the regular wage--lured workers.
In fact, there had never been so many new opportunities for paying jobs in the Amazon,
prompting large-scale jungle migration from Brazil's north and northeastern provinces. But
even the job-hungry workers had a breaking point.
"I'm a worker, not a waiter!" a Fordlandia employee reportedly yelled in the food line one day,
sparking the plantation's most notorious riot. Other workers armed with machetes joined the
protest against self-service U.S. cuisine in a country where food traditionally was served at
the table. The seringueiros demolished the cafeteria, while North American officials
scrambled to the dock, jumped into boats, and waited in the middle of the river for Brazilian
troops to quell the melee.
Violence erupted again over workers brought from Barbados. The seringueiros complained
that the islanders not only took their jobs but were also paid higher wages. One payday
uprising started with the injury of three West Indies workers and ended with Ford's agreement
to ban Barbadians from the concession. Many of the West Indians chose to remain in Brazil,
however, and their descendants live in cities along the Amazon.
Ford, who envisioned a birth-to-death company town, produced booklets with photographs of
the Fordlandia hospital staff at the "baby clinic," where working mothers could leave their
children during the day. Funerals were paid for by the company and, today, the last
U.S.-made coffin gathers dust on a wooden shelf in the yard outside a workshop. Weathered
wooden crosses, many askew or fallen, dot the old, weed-covered cemetery. Despite Ford's apparent generosities, Brazilians were accustomed to a more personalized
patrao system, in which their plantation owner served as godfather to their children. Henry
Ford, however, not only never visited the plantations, but he never even visited Brazil.
So the company-imposed routine faced hit-and-miss compliance. More than a thousand
children of the plantation workers studied at five schools, including three named after Ford's
grandsons--Henry II, Benson, and Edsel. Belterra schoolgirls dressed in white blouses and
dark skirts; the boys wore military-style shorts, shirts, and caps. Classes were conducted in
Portuguese with Brazilian teachers, and night courses offered English. Despite opposition
from workers, who understandably preferred their own customs, poetry readings, square
dances, and English sing-a-longs were the scheduled weekend activities. "Even today, there
are people who still know some of the traditional American songs," says Alexander of
Amazon Turismo.
In 1941, the North American customs caught the attention of visiting writer Charles Morrow
Wilson: "A workman's mess hall was set up, but native workers did not like the wholesome
Detroit-style cooking and complained bitterly of indigestion. North American fare in the jungle
no more pleases the customers than a quick change to Amazon fare would please you or
me," Wilson wrote in a Harpers magazine article titled "Mr. Ford in the Jungle." "Furthermore,
the natives did not choose to square dance on the village green or to sing the quaint folk
songs of Merrie England or to treasure Longfellow."
Workers responded favorably to suggestions they grow their own vegetables but ignored
Ford's no-liquor rule and, on payday, boats filled with potent cachaca pulled up at the dock.
One Belterra manager boosted morale when he deferred to local customs about meals and
made square dancing optional. Protestant Ford, who had even balked at building a Catholic
church at Fordlandia, quickly erected one in Belterra. Szilagyi, too, had to make concessions
at the hospital, a now long-closed facility that once boasted separate wards for men and
women, thirty nurses, a dentist, three physicians, and a pharmacist who doubled as an
anesthesiologist.
The doctor's biggest battle came when he opposed the local midwife and imposed a policy
requiring pregnant women to report to the hospital for prenatal check-ups and births or forfeit
their company allotment of powdered milk. "There was so much resistance that half the
people didn't obey it," Szilagyi says. "So I lifted the rule and made it voluntary. But there was
some ill feeling for a time."
The Belterra hospital served as a major medical facility in the Amazon, serving a population
of seven thousand at its peak and drawing young Brazilian physicians who served their
internships under the tutelage of U.S. doctors. Machete wounds were sewn, pneumonia was
treated, babies were delivered, and intestinal parasites were battled at the eighty-bed facility.
Doctors received the latest medical journals from a horseback rider who daily trot- ted to
Santarem to meet a mail boat. Szilagyi recalls several dramatic moments. Once he was radioed about a boat near
Fordlandia carrying a teenager with a life-threatening nose bleed. He jumped aboard another
motor boat and headed off to find the patient. "I stopped the bleeding in the middle of the
river, and I took the boy back to Belterra," he says. "We had blood transfusion equipment at
Belterra, but there was none at Fordlandia."
The plantation workers, squatters who settled on the concession, and missionaries received
free treatment at the hospital. Others who sought medical care were charged nominal fees for
procedures, which ranged from filling dental cavities to surgery for cataracts which, like other
blinding eye conditions, were brought on by the harsh jungle sun.
"We distributed cheap, dark glasses and some people used them, but most did not," says
Szilagyi, who also served as the local veterinarian. "The result is that I learned how to do eye
surgery."
There was never a rubber harvest at Fordlandia. In 1942 Belterra--where chemicals were
used against leaf blight--produced 750 tons of latex from disease-resistant Asian tree grafts,
but that fell far below the 38,000-ton annual yield the automaker sought for his US$7 million
tire plant in Michigan. Eucalyptus, teak, balsa, and other tropical woods were also among the
3.6 million trees on the Belterra concession; some wood made its way into Ford Lincolns, for
trim, but wholesale lumbering was curbed by Brazil's ban on most wood exports. Belterra's
cinnamon, ginger, coffee, tea, and cacao crops never produced significant income.
During World War II, Belterra-bound ships were hindered by German submarines plying the
Brazilian coast, leaving the plantations to live off infrequent hydroplane shipments from Belem
and a six-month food stockpile. At the time, the U.S. government was looking into a plan to
establish a military base in the region as a way to head off any Nazi attempts to sabotage the
Panama Canal.
"In 1943 we cleared an area and preparations were made to establish an airfield," Szilagyi
recalls. The plan was scrapped when Brazil joined the Allies. A few years later, Belterra and
Fordlandia would also be abandoned, victims of competition from synthetic rubber.
"Our war experience has taught us that synthetic rubber is superior to natural rubber for
certain of our products," Ford Motor Company officials said in December 1945 while
explaining they would return the concession to Brazil for a token US$250,000. The auto
company described the rubber plantations as a $20 million project, but company documents
later put the investment at $25 million, and some historians say as much as $30 million was
pumped into the plantations.
Today, there is talk of paving the rough roadway that passes Belterra en route to Santarem to
ease the way for farmers taking black pepper, grains, and soybeans to the port. Belterra and
Fordlandia's solidly built workshops, roads, and electrical lines are enticing, but their remote
locations render them hard to utilize. "It's a white elephant," says Alexander. He further explains that the Brazilian government
assumed the Companhia Industrial do Brasil payroll and paid workers to maintain the
buildings, while it lobbied Santarem local authorities to take over the complex. In a plebiscite
in late 1995, residents voted to form a new municipality incorporating Belterra.
Rubber groves at both complexes fall under the authority of Brazil's Ministry of Agriculture,
but trees no longer are tapped. Although the villages are officially closed to outsiders,
squatters at Belterra have erected huts with mud-daubed walls near the older, sturdier
Michigan-inspired buildings, and old, nonproductive trees are being felled and burned.
A Belterra building once used to coagulate rubber operates as a surgical glove factory and
negotiations are under way to expand it to produce condoms. Rubber for the facility, a worker
explains, comes from a plantation a few miles up the river.
"Fordlandia is the more problematic," Alexander says, noting that the facility--once home to
fifteen thousand workers and now occupied by a few hundred families--is only accessible via
a twelve-hour boat ride from Santarem. "But Belterra, perhaps, can be rescued and
resuscitated."
Szilagyi had planned to say the same thing at a 1945 luncheon with Ford's grandson, Henry
Ford II. But the scheduled chat about Fordlandia and Belterra was canceled and, shortly
afterward, Ford closed the plantations.
"For Belterra, if I had had a chance, I would have told him to keep going," Szilagyi says.
"They shouldn't have given it up."
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): The promise of free housing, health care, and higher salaries
hired those machete-wielding workers to Fordlandia to tap rubber trees, top.
PHOTO (COLOR): Belterra's clapboard houses surrounded by flowers and shade trees
opposite, resemble summer cottages along the U.S. Great Lakes
PHOTOS (COLOR): Dense jungle such as this remained a formidable obstacle to
communications and travel from Belterra to Fordlandia throughout the Ford plantation era
PHOTO (COLOR): At this eighty-bed hospital facility in Belterra, patients were treated for
malaria pneumonia intestinal parasites, and machete wounds. Serving a population of seven
thousand at its peak, the hospital also provided training for young Brazilian physicians who
interned under U.S. doctors
PHOTOS (COLOR): The Catholic church in Belterra, top faced onto the plaza where
weekend square dances were held. The Fordlandia sawmill middle, like other buildings, was
transported from Michigan in pieces and reassembled in the Brazilian jungle. Fire hydrants
stamped by a Michigan manufacturer are found throughout what remains of Belterra PHOTOS (COLOR): Today, hopes for reviving Belterra, above, lie with its proximity to the
port of Santarem, opposite, where farmers find outlets for their produce, such as soybeans
and black pepper, left. Plans include paving the nearly forty-mile stretch of road between still-
isolated Belterra and the port
~~~~~~~~
By Mary A. Dempsey
Mary A. Dempsey, who lives in Detroit, Michigan is a freelance journalist who writes about
Latin America for publications in the U.S. and Europe. She is a previous contributor to
Americas.
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