Fordlandia – The failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon

The article really softpedals the whole "civilize the heathen savages" angle. When Ford said he wanted to "develop" South America, what he meant was that he wanted to teach the locals how to behave like his idea of proper white folks. Racial segregation was built-in. Not just alcohol but tobacco, women, and--for some reason--football were forbidden in Fordlandia, and inspectors could demand entry at any time to make sure you were following the rules. Workers were required to work through the traditional (and very sensible, in that climate) midday siesta. Ford was even determined to make them eat like American whites--they were given only American food to eat, nothing local. The riots the article blames on a bricklayer's dispute with a supervisor were, according to Wikipedia, a revolt against the food--menu concessions were only made after the riots.

I recently read Grandin's book after learning about this from a Priceonomics article. It's fascinating not just for the way that it ultimately failed, but also the level of power and influence that Henry Ford had at the time to be able to do it at all...

The Ford Company was privately held, and what Henry Ford said, went. Enormous amounts of time, money, and manpower went into developing this colony, on the back of ideology as much as the promise of economic return.

The closest examples I can think of in modern times for this kind of project are in folks like Musk and Allen (and his Vulcan real estate development group), but they are much more capitalistic in motivation.

Not to latch on a minor turn of phrase, but it is a shame we've replaced the "employee relations office" with "human resources".

Great soundtrack, too, by Jóhann Jóhannson: https://open.spotify.com/album/2I4uGgkMgN3UGE8ZQjCMjB

Another example of how culture eats strategy for breakfast

Ford wanted to make Fordlandia a model american city, forgetting about the culture of those brazilians he was employing

It also seems he never asked the locals how to plant rubber trees. And even though it was "in the Amazon" it might have been a bad place for the rubber trees

There's a good overview--albeit a much more pessimistic one--of Fordlandia in Bill Bryson's book _1927_.

He planned a eutopia, and ended up with a utopia instead.