Henry Ford tried to build a Midwestern American town in the Amazon rainforest in the 1920s. It's true. And yes, Chuck will say this should be a movie.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, So this is Stuff you Should Know. The Wacky Strange History Edition. Get another one.
I love this one. We got a few people to thank out of the gate for this, if I may sure. First of all, we want to thank listener Brennan Wilson, who gave this idea to us through email. Okay, I had never heard of it before, so Brennan sent this in and I did a quick search, as I always do when someone sends in something, unless it's like, ooh, doing on shoe soles, But when it's something I hadn't heard of, I always look it up. And I was like, oh man, this is a really good one. I didn't know about this, So big thanks to Brennan. Big thanks to Livia who put this one together and helped us out. And Livia actually said we should thank a couple of people in particular that sort of wrote the book, well literally and figuratively. On Fordlandia, Greg Grandon wrote a book called Ford Landia Colin The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City Sporiler Alert. And then there was a paper in the late seventies by a guy named John Gaily in the Journal of Inter American Studies and World Affairs. It also had a lot of good stuff. So thanks to everyone involved. Here we go.
Wow, that was a lot. I was waiting for you to tell us who Greg Grandon said we should thank Yeah, right, mom, So we are talking about ford Landia. We are talking about what you could call Ford's Folly. Just to kind of strip a bear right out of the gate. It was Henry Ford's misadventure down in the Amazon where he tried to build a model utopian society based on rural Midwestern.
America right in the Amazon.
In the Amazon. That's a big that's a big catch right there, because I didn't try to do it in Omaha or Topeka. He chose the Amazon over Topeka. And I think that says a lot about Topeka.
Yeah. Oh, we love our Kansas. I hope they know that all but one. All but one? Right, all right, So we should talk a little bit about the sort of weirdo that was Henry Ford. Maybe we should do a hole up on him one day. I didn't know a ton about the guy. It did. A lot of great stuff was also not great in a lot of ways.
That's such a recurring theme, I know.
In nineteen oh three is where the Ford Motor Company was born in Dearborn, Michigan, and thanks to the Model T, it changed America. It was a car that was available, more available than any car had ever been to like regular Americans. He paid his workers a living wage, which at the time was five dollars a day, and he he also had a lot of strings attached to that good wage and those good jobs along the lines of like, hey, I know we're a car company, but let's have a sociology department in our company where we send out hundreds of investigators around Dearborn into the homes of my employees to make sure that the kids are going to school and everything is tidy, the wife isn't working, and that people aren't drinking booze.
Yeah. It was the Ford Motor Company equivalent of the Gestapo, the secret police, who they weren't coming to your company owned house that you lived in on the Ford Motor Company campus. This is your house in Michigan. And these people felt totally fine coming by and checking on your family, to make sure that you were living up to Henry Ford's personal standards of old timey, squeaky clean americanness.
Yeah, but at the same time he would also, like I said, pay them a good wage. He would, would give them great healthcare, he would he would help citizenship along. If he had immigrants working for them, he would help them with their applications, help them get home loans. So it was one of those things where he was like, I feel like I'm paying you well and I'm doing a lot of good for you and your family, and that gives me the right as really just your uber boss, to dictate how you should live your life as well. It's insane, it is.
He was an anti Semite. It's pretty well trid that Hitler was at least in part inspired by the writings, the anti semite, anti semitic writings of Henry Ford. Yeah, he was a huge fan of square dancing. You could call it an obsession essentially.
Yeah, it's very, very weird.
He met his wife at a square dance and apparently he thought that that was the end I'll be all of rural American life, that that was a perfect pastime, a perfect symbol everybody should be into square dancing.
I mean nothing wrong with square dancing. I'm not knocking square dancing. Just to be clear.
Oh okay, God, I'm glad you said that, because I was about to. He was also big time into soy Like he apparently some of the early model t's, their knobs and stuff were made out of basically a proto soy plastic. He ate soy as much as he could. He seemed to have kind of fallen in the footsteps of the Kellogg brothers a little bit. I get the Yeah, he was that kind of old timey vegetarian cook yag exactly, but he also had some His business acumen was just insane. Like, he wasn't just a businessman, he was an industrialist. This guy was a titan of industry because he made the industry himself essentially, and what he was responsible for in part was the assembly line. But also it might not have come up with the concept, but he really adopted something called vertical integration.
Yeah, that's the idea. Say let's say you're building cars and you're like, oh, well, I want to make my own tires instead of buying them from Firestone. So I'm going to start making my tires, and uh, well, I want my own rubber then to make these tires, Like why pay somebody for rubber if I'm going to be making all these tires for myself and these cars. And so that's what inspired the idea for Landy is like, let's go where the rubber is and buy up land and start, you know, milking these rubber trees. You know, milk rubber trees, probably m milk. Tap them, tap them, that's right, and tap these rubber trees. And then basically what you're trying to do is control control the entire supply chain by owning it from the from the bottom up.
Right, which means like buying coal mines to to fuel the vulcanization process of hardening rubber, buying up railroads to deliver the coal to the factories like that. Yeah, like owning every aspect of what you need to produce use your final product. That was what he was into, that vertical integration. And like you said, I mean that is why he ended up in Brazil. Yeah.
Do you know what kind of like titan of industry you have to be for someone to come in and say, I'll tell you what's killing us right now? These shipping costs on the railroads, and he's like, well, let's buy the railroad then.
Yeah, I mean it makes sense and most people might even think about it, but you can't actually do it.
Yeah, exactly. So this idea though, of building, and as you'll see, it was much more than let's go to the Amazon and buy some land and grow rubber. It was for him it seems like even more so, like let's go down there and build this utopian society that I dream of where people square dance, you know, and drinks and curses and stuff like that. But this wasn't a brand new thing for him. In nineteen twenty one, he tried to do a similar thing in northern Alabama, near Muscle Shoals, on a seventy five mile stretch of land where there were some sort of abandoned facil were two nitrate facilities from World War One, and there was the construction and well partial construction of the Wilson Dam. And he said, you know what, let's move there, Let's restart those projects and get people working and kind of found a new society there basically where no one was living. He offered five million bucks to lease the dam. I guess to the government, and a lot of people in the government weren't down with it, and it eventually just kind of fell apart.
Well, supposedly it was just one senator from Alabama who you really opposed it, Yeah, and it was yeah, yeah, that's a tradition. Apparently this senator got death threats from people in Alabama, not just in the Muscle Shoals area, but like all over Alabama. They had mobilized to start feeding this million million person workforce that Henry Stower's gun employment. Like, they changed everything they were doing and started to ramp up production in anticipation of this, and this one senator got in the way and said, nope, I was getting too sweet a deal. And he killed it. And he killed it enough that Henry Ford was like, fine, I'll just go somewhere else. And the guy started getting death threats. Apparently he made a visit to Muscle Shoals and had to have armed bodyguards with him because he was in that much in danger that many people were that mad at him.
Holy cow. All right, so we've covered Ford. He was a strange man, he was an anti Semite, he's a titan of industry. And now we got to cover the rubber part of this, not where the rubber meets the road, but where the rubber meets the podcast. Oh man, that was the saddest little grunty groan I've ever heard out of you.
It was involunteer. I'm sorry.
I know you couldn't even I could tell you couldn't even help it. Oh boy, Like, there's no way that you're gonna die before me. But if you happen to, huh, I feel like I would just And I know that you're not going to have an open casket funeral either, but let's say you did, Okay, I feel like I would go and lean over your by and just tell you how great it was working with you all those years, and you would make that same sound.
Why you say I'm not going to have an open casket funeral? Do you know something I don't. No.
I thought you were going to like either be shot out of a canon or cremated and scattered or sky burialed or something.
Oh no, that's all. That's so old. No, I don't know what I'm going to do yet, but I could have an open casket. I can be cremated. After everybody's like, hey, good respect to see you later. Good to meet you. I don't know who you are, but way to go. All right, that's what I expect people to say.
It might be that that's what today. So the world is being industrialized in the early twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, rubber became a very big deal. Rubber is a product of South America originally, and the Amazon region had a lot of rubber trees down there, so they were like the dominant player. And rubber trees down there grew just sort of where they wanted to grow. It wasn't like a plantation crop or something like that really grew. And so along the Amazon they were building little cities and stuff to support that industry for many, many years.
Yeah, they put a lot of effort into like supporting this rubber trade. And Brazil was like the basically the only player on the market. That's where the rubber trees were, and if you wanted rubber, that's where you had to go because we didn't have synthetic rubber yet. Yeah, so somebody some brit I don't remember, we've talked about it before. Yeah, don't remember what episode. Maybe we did one on rubber, I'm not sure, but brit said, hey, you know, Sri Lanka has a very similar climate to the Amazon, maybe those rubber trees will grow there. And not only did the rubber trees grow there, the rubber trees had no natural pests or.
Enemies.
Sure, predators, parasites, yeah, all of those things. It had none of them, I should say. So those things flourished like crazy in Sri Lanka and other parts of I guess central Southeast Asia, that's right, not Central Asia.
Yeah, and that really put a dent in the rubber economy in Brazil kind of collapsed at basically, and following that in nineteen twenty two, the Stevenson Plan in Britain said basically said hey, if you're a French planter or a British planter in one of our Asian colonies, you can restrict the supply of rubber. You can create a false market basically to raise the rubber prices all around the world. And so all of a sudden America was going, we're being squeezed here by the Stevenson Plan. So at the time Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover Hobalt Hoovel steps up and says, all right, we gotta get some rubber going on our own now and develop our supply chain, So go do it. In nineteen twenty four, he sent a technical mission down to Brazil to look again once again in the Amazon and see if they can bring the Amazon back and make it a player again. And that's what they tried to do. They were It was basically like which companies would go there and which companies would go elsewhere. I think Goodyear ended up going somewhere else, Firestone ended up going somewhere else. They went to Liberia, Goodyear went to the Philippines and Sumatra. But Ford was still like, I want to make my own tires. I don't want to buy from those guys. So there's like, why don't we do it?
Yeah? He also so I get the impression after researching this that getting rubber to make his own tires was almost a pretext for him that he that's what he needed to tell people, That's what he needed to spend Ford Motor Company money on. But what he really wanted to do was to basically tame the Amazon to I'm making scare quotes all over the place here, civilize the people of the Amazon, and basically turned them into world Midwestern Americans with square dancing on their mind all time, right, I know. So that's really what he wanted to do. He didn't even care if he made money, he didn't care if he lost tons of money. He wanted to make this utopian society. And the Amazon was as great a place as any because it was such a challenge. And also if you went to Sumatra or he went to the Philippines, like it was a different place, like there were also other colonial powers there. The Amazon was right because everybody went somewhere else, and Ford said, I'm going there.
Yeah, And they said we would like you to come here, because Henry Ford was, like you said, he was a business magnet. He was a worldwide, well known name, basically a celebrity all around the world. And in Brazil they were like, listen, we need someone like Henry Ford here to kind of put us back on the map rubber wise. And so they basically said, hey, listen, we'll give you land if you come over here and start your rubber business here. And that's what they did. In nineteen twenty seven, they got the Ford Motor Company got a gift of two and a half million acres alongside the Tapajos river, and he said, here's the deal. I made a deal with the government there after twelve years, I could give yourself a dozen years to get going, and then you can start paying Brazil seven percent and then two percent to the local governments. I don't now why they capped it at nine percent. You know that was ten and Ford talked him down like a percentage point or something.
Yeah.
Probably they got some kickbacks, about one hundred and twenty five grand in kickbacks to make it happen between people who sort of negotiated the deal, which really made Ford mad, because, as you know, a guy who loves great answing doesn't like kickbacks, you know what I'm saying.
No, and one hundred and twenty five grand in kickbacks in nineteen twenty seven is two point one seven million dollars today, a lot of money. Yeah, one point seven h nine million pounds and one point ninety seven one million euros.
Yeah, which he might have thought, that's very thorough.
Well, you called me out for not having the euro conversion before, so I would made sure I was prepared today.
Yeah, he might have been a little rankled because he might have thought he could have paid less for two and a half million acres there.
I don't know. I think it was the moral part of it. Yeah, you hit it on the head. He was a square dancer.
That's right.
So but that was just part for the course, apparently. I think it's changed dramatically since then.
Yeah, but what you were saying about his like his desire was more to make that thing. There's a quote where he said was his desire was not to make money, but to develop that wonderful and fertile land.
Yes, the very quote I was searching for while I was making that point, but couldn't object. So thank you, because that's yeah, that's what he wanted to do. But as far as Ford Motor companies concerned, like they're going down there to start up a rubber plantation and make their own rubber, to make their own tires, part of the vertical integration plan, and so there were there were not not everybody was on board with this. Yeah, because anybody who anything about the rubber market said, hey, that Stevenson planned that the Brits enacted in nineteen twenty two. They shot themselves in the foot. They kept from exporting rubber to try to artificially influence prices. But the Dutch didn't go along with it, and they undercut the Brits, and now the Dutch control most of the American market and they're selling at perfectly reasonable prices. We don't actually need to set up our own rubber plantations. And they said for it, said no, We're going down to the Amazon, and he made it happen. He did.
August nineteen twenty eight. He started shipping stuff down to Brazil. The problem initially, and boy, there were a lot of problems, but let's call this problem number one. They chose a site high up in elevation because they didn't want to be involved in flooding, which sort of makes sense. But it was so far inland that these steamerships pulling these barges, taking all these supplies to literally build a city, essentially, they couldn't get down these these shallow rivers. So it took forever. It took like over like well not over a year, but you know, nine to ten months for the supplies to finally get there. So the timeline from the beginning was just super slow.
Yes, they finally did get there in early nineteen twenty nine, and the steamer captain who was the captain of the steamership that pulled the barge of supplies down there. Initially was a Danish man named Einard Oxholm, and he is a really great example of Ford and Ford Motor Company's idea that if you are competent at one thing, you can be competent at anything. I saw it described as basically a corporate wide arrogant optimism that you could just get in there and get things done. If you were a smart person and you applied scientific principles, you could do anything. So he appointed innerd Oxholm as the manager of this plantation and settlement. This, Yeah, the steamship captain is now run the entire show down there.
Now. Yeah, he had no experience at all and anything like this. But like you said, Ford thought he's a good guy. I like the cut of his jib. Have you seen him? Have you seen him square dance?
Right exactly.
Let's get this guy some cloggy shoes or what. I don't even know what those are called. We got to do one in square dancings.
Oh yeah, they're called clogs. I think.
Okay, they're gonna be so mad at us.
Who the square dancers?
Yeah, I don't know.
Man, Maybe we'll find out it's actually super interesting and cool.
No, no, no, we'll do a podcast on it. But I'm just saying we're gonna get emails. But the anger's email you're gonna get from a square dancer is maybe how dare you right? And that's where it's capped.
Yeah, yeah, in all caps.
So Oxholme hired a bunch of locals. Obviously, they cleared out the jungle, they started setting up their buildings. The initial name of the community was Boa Vista, as you can tell by the name of the title. It was eventually renamed Ford Landia. This would be a great I don't know why this hasn't been a movie yet.
It's surprising.
I'd say that a lot. But I think in this case it would be pretty good to be.
In, like the the spirit of Road to Wellville.
Yeah, yeah, totally.
Okay.
So they're down there working these locals literally to death at times. Disease was killing a lot of them, a lot of these and as we'll see, there are a lot of these workers would revolt given the working conditions for numerous reasons that will hit on. But there there were a number of riots over the period of time that they tried to get Fordlandia up and off the ground, and you know, things were going very slow. So Ford was like, you know what, we're tearing down this forest. Why don't we at least sell this wood and we can make a little scratch. But no one wanted it, so there was no market for the woods. So that was another thing that kind of went down the tubes.
What else, oh, everything else? Basically they they I don't understand why, if you believe in applying scientific principles and all that to get something done, they didn't hire an agronomist, Yeah, agronomist.
Agronomist maybe I don't know.
I think I finally hit a pot. They didn't hire anybody who had any experience with plants. They hired Ford Motor Company executives who had been working in Dearborn, Michigan, to go down and make this thing happen. Like again, arrogant optimism that they these guys could do this even though they knew nothing about plants and rubber plants, and that would just immediately start to come back and bite them.
Yeah, they did things like, oh, I don't know, plant trees at the wrong time, plant trees in the wrong places. Nothing. They did seemed to work as far as the botany angle goes and the biology angle goes. The trees. Like I said earlier, the rubber trees are naturally growth through the Amazon. But he was like he wanted to set up like the plantation style thing where he just had these huge plots of rubber trees as a monoculture, which they successfully did in Asia where they didn't have those enemies like you were talking about, those pests, so it flourished there. But in South America, as Lvia puts it, it was like an all you can eat buffet for these pests. That was bad enough. Then at one point they said, oh, here's what we'll do. Well, let's introduce these ants, these salva ants, because they eat the caterpillars that are killing our rubber trees. So they introduce all these ants, and the ants are like, you know, it tastes better than caterpillar rubber trees. So they literally introduced a new pest on top of all that.
Exactly, they just like wave it like the caterpillars they walk past while they were both eating the rubber tree, and.
They said, you know, it tastes better than rubber trees. Clogging shoes.
You know, it tastes better than clogging shoes salva ants.
Wait, clogging is different in square antsing. Someone's going to call us out on that.
That's fine, doesn't matter. The point is that salva ants are one of the few species of insects that are are prepared and served as food because they're tasting, not for their protein, kind of because they're taste.
See, I get your joke now. Yeah, they thought you were just being cheeky.
No, no, it's true. I was, but it was also true.
Yet cheeky with a point, which is sort of your motto.
Yeah, that's an album name right there, right, so it's.
A squeeze album.
I think they that's a great, great one. The oh yeah, salva ants tasting. They taste like ginger, lemon, grass and part of them, and you can serve them on raw pineapple and they taste amazing. Apparently it really pops. I don't know if any of the executives are workers in Ford Landia knew this. I'm guessing the workers probably did. And I wonder how many ants were eaten right just because they were so tasty. But either way, it didn't work to get rid of the caterpillars. And that's just one of just so many examples of them just trying something that seems like it would work, but only ending up demonstrating their complete and total ignorance of this.
Yeah, exactly, So things are going well. In September of twenty nine, Ford sitting down a trouble shooter to get a report, like, what's going on down there? Really? And he came back and said, there's a quote complete lack of organization. The Minister of Agriculture in Brazil thinks Henry Ford is crazy and a quote at present, it's like dropping money into a sewer the end.
So things are not going well, Chuck, Do you want to take a break and come back and talk about how things continued to not go well?
Yeah?
Okay, So things are not going very well for the Ford Motor Company down in Brazil. But just like with his workers in Michigan, Ard did fulfill his promises to the workers in the Amazon in Brazil that he would take care of them in exchange for them trying to act like rural midwesterners pretend to like square dancing. So they built hospitals. They built a really great cutting edge hospital right there in the middle of the Amazon. They erected a water tower, which was the highest structure of the tallest structure of the Amazon for quite a while. They installed swimming pools and golf courses. There were generators that produced electricity, their sawmills, like they created the city, and they also added prefab houses for the workers to live in. The thing is is like all this stuff was delivered to them, was given to the workers in exchange for their labor. But also they paid something like thirty five cents a day, which is better than the slave labor they were engaged in before. But the thing is, I think the Ford Motor executives were just expected the Brazilians to say, oh, thank you for giving us running water, even we'll do anything you want. And they found over time, as we'll see time and time again, that no, the people of the Amazon have a tremendous amount of pride and they're not willing to just kind of roll over for somebody like Henry Ford or his incompetent boobs from Dearborn.
Yeah, but it was also it's also we should point out that it wasn't it was segregated still like the Via Americana, which was the neighborhood with the swimming pool and the golf course and the tennis courts and all that stuff that was for the US staff and their families. They did have running water. The Brazilian workers, I think they could use the pool and stuff like that, but they had their accommodations weren't as good. They had well water. They had to live in these and this was again just thinking you can just transplant a Midwestern American city and drop it in Brazil. Ill it doesn't work. Because they had their homes traditionally built off the ground with thatch roofs to keep it cool. Henry Ford built iron roofed square duplexes that were steaming hot. Said here, eat this food that we eat, Eat this whole wheat bread, and eat this canned fruit. And they were getting like stomach aches and they were getting sick. Because you can't just go in and radically change a culture's diet overnight either.
The microbiome does not like that.
No, So they had square dances though they really did.
They did have square dances like Not only that, they also had readings of Walt Whitmen and other American poets that were pre industrial translated into Portuguese. They said no, no, no, you can't drink, just like our workers in Dearborn they said no, no, no, we're not going to listen to you. And so that one didn't stick. But apparently there was square dancing, like you said. The problems, though, were not so much like the houses being too hot or the square dancing being just non never ending. It was things like really instituting American ideas like an eight hour ten or probably ten or twelve hour work day among the workers, and that's not how they worked before. They would take time off during the hottest part of the day. Traditionally when it was the rainy season, they would work less. When it was a drier season, they would work more. This is not what Ford expected them to do. So there were cultural clashes like right out of the gate, and rather than even ask what the problem was with the Brazilians, the people of the Amazon, the Ford Motor executives just expected them to fall into line and to acquiesce and just do what Ford was telling them to do.
Yeah, and then just little things like many of the Brazilians would sleep in hammocks every night, and all of a sudden they were in bed, which isn't the same. You would think, oh, you get a bed instead of a hammock. But if you're if you're not used to it, that's like throwing us in a hammock. Although some people say brad and hammocks. I don't say good in a hammock, but they I think. There was an interview in nineteen ninety four in the South Florida Sun Sentinel with a doctor from that hospital, doctor Emerick.
Oh boy, I'm so glad you tried.
I'm gonna say zilagy. Okay, jeez, a word when a name starts with s z here in trouble right out of the gate, for sure. But there was a you know, a nineteen ninety four interview with him. He ran the hospital for like three years, and he was like, listen, we would put them in these hospital beds. They're used to hammocks. And we would come back and they had like cut the mattresses open and dug holes in this center so they could have that sort of hammocky curve in their beds. They'd liked midwives to deliver their babies, and he even admitted we withheld food from these pregnant women and until they agreed to go to a hospital and have a nurse to it.
Right. So in Ford's mind, like we're giving you guys cutting edge hospital equipment and medical care, but you have to accept it exactly the way that we're presenting it, right, and not just the medical care, but everything, just the very existence. As a worker in Ford Landy, you had to accept it as it was being presented. There was no adapting to local traditions, local climate, local anything. It was so that anytime somebody is taking something from somewhere else and is rigidly refusing to adapt it to this new environment, that thing is going to fail. I can't think of a single project that has succeeded in that respect. Maybe when we start living in space, like on the Moon or something like that, that would qualify. Maybe the ISS qualifies in that sense. It's submarine that people live on that would qualify too, Right, there's all sorts of ones that actually qualify.
But in this sale, land on planet Earth.
Okay, in this case it did not work because they were too rigid and they would not adapt to local conditions.
Yeah, it was a man crazed with an idea, and that never leads to success. It seems like because they're usually, like you said, rigid and nonconforming, and that's just no way to run an operation, right exactly. So, speaking of not running an operation, Oxholm left in nineteen thirty. He was the original ship captain and then manager of the whole thing m He told the Detroit News it was the hardest proposition I ever tackled in my life. A couple of other guys cycled through pretty quickly in that position, and things started getting more and more heated, and these sort of you know I talked about the riots that broke out, they became more frequent and more serious.
Yeah. One of the problems was these the executives didn't even speak Portuguese. They would just sit there and like boss around the Brazilian workers in English and expect them to do what they were saying and expect them to understand what they were saying. One of the things that really that's there's a couple of chapters of Ford Landy, and the thing that ended the first chapter was, strangely a transition from table table service cafeteria seating right where you would just sit at a table and somebody would come over and bring you food to a cafeteria line type of food service.
Right and goes stand in the hot sun for your food.
Exactly, and they did not like that. They ended up getting very hot and getting very angry and very hungry. Angry you could even say hot and angry in the Amazon is not a good combination. So tensions were already high among the workers just from having to do this now. And apparently a man named Manuel Keaitano DeJesus, who was a brick mason at Fordlandia, said something to Kaj Ostenfeldt, who was a Ford supervisor at Fordlandia, about the new cafeteria plan, and ostin feld just basically laughed in Dejesus's face. Right, And not only did that upset to Hayesus, it upset it upseted as coworkers who were around two, and in very short order they started rioting.
Yeah, they were like, guess what, we have machetes. They wrecked the cafeteria, they wrecked the generators, they wrecked a lot of the equipment, and the buildings, the residential buildings. And this is the best part, and I love that Livia dug this out. They sort of like an office space with that copier. They put a real hurtin on those time clocks. Yeah, that they were punching every day.
And they ended up actually occupying Ford Landia for three days because apparently the Ford executives had fast boats hidden along the river for just such an emergency, and they fled. So the workers took over Fordlandia and occupied it, and the Ford Motor Companies executives were friends with Juan tripp Or Gpe, who was the president of pan AM, who said, sure, we'll let you charter a few of our jets and get some of the Brazilian military in there to suppress this rebellion, and they did. After three days, the workers gave up peacefully and left. They left because they were fired. Apparently Ford paid them up to December twenty second, which was the beginning of the rioting day, and they were fired on Christmas Day, I believe, And that was the end of the first chapter. Ford Landy just kind of fell into disuse momentarily, but in very short order Ford sent another guy, and this guy was the best manager Ford Landy ever saw. His name was Archibald Johnston. He was a Scotsman.
Yeah, Yeah, he came in. He said, we need roads, we need paved roads. We need to connect all this stuff. He built more houses, he built a movie theater, he built that dance all because he had to have the square dancing. Yeah, basically just kind of improvement en mass to everything, the hospitals, the schools, the living conditions and everything. He said, hey, worker, set up a garden, but you should also still adopt this diet and grow the things that Henry Ford says you should eat and grow.
Right. But the thing about Johnston, the workers called him the white tiger because he was. He got there and he was like, Okay, I can make this work. And he did. He adapted to the local situation. He was willing to understand where the Brazilians were coming from, where the workers were coming from. He was less rigid as far as we're old Midwestern expectations were concerned, right, And he was a success as a result. And I think he showed up in nineteen thirty one, I believe is when he took over, and he was there for several years and under his overseas ship overseership, Yeah, his oversight as watch. Finally, finally Ford hires a plant person, not even not even like a botanist. It was a plant pathologist who is good with figuring out what things that are plaguing plants, but they're not necessarily good at getting plantations going. But they hired at least somebody who knew what they were talking about with plants, named James Weir.
Yeah, he hired someone who knew plant right, that was as basic as a guy. Yeah, James Weir, like you said, and you know, and this was because you know, they had the city going and they were building this town. But there was also the rubber operation that we kind of, you know, forget about at times in this crazy story. But they were like, maybe we should actually start, you know, getting the rubber growing. So he Weir came in and he tried some new methods, didn't work out too well, and he said, you know, what we need to do, really, this is garbage area now because of everything that we've done to it. What we really need is to start over in an area close by. So in nineteen thirty four, Henry Ford managed to work out a land swap of a parcel about eighty miles downstream where they built a new plantation called Belterra, and this actually produced some rubber. They brought in some of those successful trees from Asia, and they grew. I believe they capped out at about twenty five hundred employees compared to ford Landia's four or five hundred, so things were going better, but they still I think at their max. In nineteen forty two, they produced seven hundred and fifty tons of latex, which sounds like a lot, but apparently that was just like a drop in the bucket of what Ford needed for their tires. So even though it was more successful, it still didn't satisfy what they wanted or what they needed from the beginning.
And to kind of add insult to injury to all the people who donated blood, sweat, and tears and sometimes their lives to getting Ford's rubber per used. Ford gave up on the idea of making it his own tires the same year they started getting rubber from the rubber trees down in Brazil.
That's right.
So Ford he his I don't have the impression that he ever made it down there. I think, oh yeah, I don't believe he ever did, but he he kind of ended up getting a little distracted from his company. He set up a museum of like a rural like an ode to rural, pre industrial American life that you can still go to today. It's called Greenfield, it's in Dearborn. He just got he was he got less interested in the company, and so his son became president. I think all the way back in nineteen ninety nineteen edzel Ford. But to Henry Ford, his son was just a figurehead. Apparently at one executive board beating, ezel Ford said that he was in favor of adding hydraulic breaks to the cars, and Henry Ford jumped to his feet and said, will you shut up in the state and the cars the board meeting. Yeah, and he's the president of Ford, so he had to put up with a lot. But he was like, we need to sell this. As early as nineteen thirty five he was looking for buyers. The problem is everybody knew the kind of problems for was having done in Brazil, and.
Yeah, no one wanted No one wanted it. Yeah, I don't blame him. Nineteen forty three is when Edsel died. There was a bit of a power struggle, but eventually Henry Ford the second, who was Henry's grandson, came on board in nineteen forty five as president and kind of started cleaning house in the company, and any operation in the company that wasn't doing well went away. And this and Ford landy it was kind of the tops on the list, basically, and they managed to sell it back to the Brazilian government right after all those years.
At a loss, with all the land and all the improvements, Brazilian government should sure, why not, We'll take.
It back exactly.
The Brazilians turned into a cattle ranch. Is a bit ironic because Henry Ford was famous for hating cows. I don't know if we touched upon that at the very outset when we were talking about how weird he is, but he hated cows. He didn't like horses either, but he really hated cows. And that makes edzel Ford's death even more ironic too, because edzel Ford got ulcers and his father insisted that he drinks some unpasteurized milk from one of Henry Ford's farms, and the bugs in the milk killed edzel in nineteen forty three. Wow. Yeah, his own father bossing him around, making him drink unpasteurized milk from a cow that he didn't even like, killed his son. That's how Edzell went.
But he hated cows before that, right.
Yes, he grew up on a farm, so as much as he idealized royal life, he couldn't stand farm animals.
You know what, I love square dancing exactly know what I hate? Cows?
Yeah, they ate the hay that he used to square dance on, and so he didn't like them.
I'm looking at a picture of Henry Ford now and I'm trying to think of who would play him today, Sam.
Rockwell, Sam Rockwall will play everybody.
Hey, that that wouldn't be too bad. You'd have to age him up a little bit, but that's not a bad idea.
Actually, you know a movie I keep going back to that. I just I can watch it almost anytime. I get the notion I am the pretty thing that lives in the house. That Osgoode Perkins movie.
I didn't see that.
I have definitely told you about it multiple times. Do you need to put it towards the top of your list?
Well, you told me about The Devil's his other movie. What was it about the girls in the.
The Black Coat's Daughter?
Yeah, Black Coats Daughter.
I still haven't seen that either.
No, no, no, I saw it and I didn't like it. And even Mad at me because of that, like a year you.
Well, what the good thing about me is I forget very quickly, so I'm not mad at you anymore. No, this is this is much much different than The Black Coat's Daughter, much different.
I don't have to check that out.
Yeah, it's it's a it's a cozy, cozy, haunted.
House story, the same rock Well in it.
No, I was just thinking about that movie.
Gary Oleman could blame too. He does that aged up thing, chameleon thing pretty well.
What about Harrison Ford? They have to age him down?
Love Harrison Ford. Don't like the aging I thought they did a good job from the trailers. Did you see Oppenheimer yet? No?
I haven't yet.
Gary Olman pops up in that.
Yeah, I heard a lot of people. Do Have you seen Barbie going tonight?
It's great, Capital G.
You're not tell me anything else about it, but I heard it already hit a billion dollars.
Well, it's Capital G great and it's about Barbie.
Okay, don't tell me anything else though, please?
You know who plays Barbie? Shh, yes, you know what I mean? You know, right?
Yeah? Of course? Why are you telling me more stuff about Barbie?
Though?
When I've very clearly asked you not to.
I just wondered if like saying things like it's about Barbie was too much.
Yes, it is. That's what I'm saying. I like to go in totally fresh, Well, Sanza.
It's called Barbie, but it's about Henry Fort.
Awesome and you who plays Henry Port, who's Sam Rockwell, Margo Roby. Oh, very nice.
It's quite a transformation.
Yeah, that was all very unexpected.
All right, well let's wind this up. So rubber, synthetic rubber comes along. Everything changes. The rubber tree is not as useful as it.
Was before because from hero to zero, that's.
Right, pretty quickly, and ford Landia, though parts of ford Landia are still there, it is now what's known as sort of well, I won't see abandoned city because there were a few hundred people that live there for a few decades. But in twenty sixteen there was a writer for The Guardian who went down there to report and they're now like several thousand people who have now moved into Fordlandia and live there. Working with gypsum, right.
Yeah, there's really high quality gypsum deposits discovered shortly after Ford left and so these people like support the miners or mine themselves. So yeah, if you like, to the people of America who know this story, it's like, oh, Ford Landy and bell Terra are these abandoned failed you know, cities that Ford tried. If you ask people in Brazil, it's like, no, bel Terra and Ford Landy are cities in Paris State in Brazil. Like they're they They've been inhabited this entire time and they still are. So they're they were abandoned by Ford, but not Brazil.
Yeah. But and you can look up pictures today for Orlandia there are still warehouses. That water tower I think is still standing, right.
Yes, I think it might still be operating.
Oh wow. Yeah, but it is definitely interesting to see sort of the remnants of this place that it's This has got to be a movie one day. I'm telling you, you just put Margot Roby in it.
In your golden Okay, you got anything else?
I don't think I have anything else, sir, I don't either.
Chuck Well, Chuck mentioned Margot Robie again. He unlocked listener mail.
That's right, but instead of listener mail, we would love to talk very briefly about our kids book that is now available for purchase. Yes, yeah, let's do that.
Yeah.
So what we did with McMillan Publishing is is we took our book for adults, not like it was triple lex or anyhow, and we kidified it.
You know.
We took out some of the stuff, some of the chapters that shouldn't be there. We added some stuff, we rewrote some things to make it a little more kid friendly. And what we ended up was was what I think is a great kids.
Book, a dynamo book for young readers.
That's right, and it's available now, get one for your kids. It looks great. Everyone at McMillan was so wonderful to work with, for sure, and it makes a great Christmas gift or birthday Kiff the stocking stuffer, and it's called stuff Kids Should Know by you and I and our buddy Nil's Parker who helped us write this thing.
Yes, So where can you get a chuck?
You can get it everywhere, you know. Our advice is always to seek out a local bookseller and support your local bookstores and get one there. They're all over the place at regular bookstores, kids bookstores. But throw a rock and you're gonna hit one of these books, probably, yeah, but.
If you hit it with the rock, you have to buy it store polish. Well, that was a very good idea, Chuck, So everybody, I hope if you go out and get our book, you enjoy it thoroughly and you can let us know what you think about it via email. You can send those emails to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.