Fordlandia by Greg Grandin Read Free Book Online

protected them from mosquitoes. Better-paid workers—hospital orderlies, coffee roasters, cooks and their helpers, waiters, log loaders, swampers, deckmen, firemen, gardeners, painters, oilers, janitors, sweepers, clerks, bookkeepers, stenographers, teachers for the Brazilian children’s school, draftsmen, boat pilots, meatcutters, tinsmiths, and blacksmiths—lived in slightly nicer houses, often made of milled wood, but also with thatched roofs and dirt floors. As the workforce increased, the town grew haphazardly, with packing crate planks recycled as boardwalks, laid over a midway that turned to mud in the rain and baked into ruts in the sun.

    Top: An “ambulance” arrives at Fordlandia’s hospital, designed by Albert Kahn. Below: The scene in the hospital ward .
    By 1930, the plantation’s lines of administration had evolved into a more or less settled routine. Oxholm, who either decided or was told to leave the plantation two months after Perini’s arrival, was still the nominal manager, yet work was organized through a number of departments: “plantation,” “gardens,” “construction,” “sawmill,” “transportation,” “general stores,” “kitchens,” “clerical,” and “medical.” Americans, Europeans, and skilled Brazilians presided as managers and assistant foremen over work gangs of Brazilian laborers, who mostly remained nameless as far as company records were concerned so long as they didn’t try to organize a union, steal, or cause some other kind of trouble. Archie Weeks oversaw the largest part of the labor force, the men who did the hardest, most exhausting, and often deadliest work, beating back the jungle, quarrying stone, cutting underbrush, sawing trees, burning the wood waste, tilling the ash and soil, and planting new blocks of rubber. Weeks developed a “rare knack of training the natives to do his work,” according to his personnel file. He was a “driver,” but in a way that “made his men like it,” which may very well have been the case since most credited him with whatever progress Perini saw upon his arrival.

    In other areas of plantation life, however, efforts to accustom a fast-growing labor force to Ford-style regimentation, discipline, and hygiene generated tensions, often aggravated by brusque and antagonizing managers. Oxholm, for instance, had organized a ten-man “service department” to enforce Prohibition, dispatching his agents to do spot searches of the bunkhouses and bungalows and to confiscate any stashed liquor. Kaj Ostenfeld, who was from Denmark but had worked for five years as a cashier in a Rio Ford dealership, was put in charge of the camp’s payroll. His rude impatience in explaining certain deductions from biweekly wages, including for food service, compounded the resentment single men already felt about having to eat in a crowded mess hall (married employees who lived in the plantation’s riverside village were allowed to eat at home). And though Dr. Colin Beaton was respectful in his dealings with his patients, his efforts to make the plantation village conform to certain hygienic standards were felt to be radically intrusive. Before coming to Fordlandia, most of the workers had been destitute but at least had the freedom of living as they saw fit. 10
    At Fordlandia they found themselves subject to the dictates of “sanitation squads” and “medical teams” that roamed the camp, draining and oiling potential mosquito breeding sites, killing stray dogs, checking for gonorrhea, and swatting flies. Inspectors swept into homes to make sure that food was correctly stored, that latrines were kept clean, and that all knew how to use, and properly dispose of, company-provided toilet paper. Their efforts to prevent families from sleeping in the same room where the cooking fire was kept not only were impractical, since the company had not built multiroom houses, but ignored the local practice of using the smoke to protect from insects.