Fordlandia by Greg Grandin Read Free Book Online Page A

Inspectors fined families that didn’t keep the small, crude pig and chicken corrals in front or on the sides of their houses clean and insisted that women hang wet laundry on clotheslines. Dr. Smith, a pathologist Dearborn sent down to assist Dr. Beaton, believed that the common practice of laying items flat on the ground to dry helped transmit hookworm and other soil parasites.
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    Dr. and Mrs. Smith show off a collection of butterflies, tarantulas, and other jungle fauna .

    BEHIND THE NATIVE village, to the left if one’s back was to the river, stood a dozen or so clapboard bungalows where European, American, and Brazilian engineers, foremen, and sawmill workers lived. Among them, working in the plant and seed division, was David Serique, the son of Julio Serique, a Tangiers-born Jewish émigré who helped Harry Wickham gather the Tapajós seeds that ended Brazil’s dominance of the world’s rubber supply. Also at the estate were a few of Santarém’s Southern Baptist Confederates, who in an odd historical turn first encountered northern industrial regimentation in the Amazon. During the plantation’s first bungling years, members of this community provided indispensable support, provisioning it with goods and interpreting local language and culture for its managers. David Riker acted as a translator and also ran the plantation’s cattle yard and stockyard. Pushing seventy, he is described in his personnel file as an “older man than the Company would usually employ to put in charge of so large a work.” Yet his intimate knowledge of the Tapajós, along with the fact that since his father had established a small rubber farm on the outskirts of Santarém he was one of the only people around with experience in cultivating Hevea , compensated for his age. “Healthy and active,” with “several good years ahead,” Riker, aside from his service as labor recruiter and interpreter, presided over the “cleanest native camp on our premise.” Three of his sons moved to Dearborn, where they took jobs at the River Rouge. As the oldest man in the camp, Riker had the honor in early 1928 of planting Fordlandia’s symbolic first seedling in a patch of cleared forest. A dozen or so workers stood in a circle as the old man pushed his spade into the soil with his foot, turned it, set the seedling in the hole, and patted the soil back in. He then said a few quiet words asking that the Lord bless the tree and make prosperity, for the plantation and the valley, flow from its bark. 11

    Many of Fordlandia’s skilled workers were “prosperity boomers,” who, having arrived in Latin America to help dig the Panama Canal twenty years earlier, passed from one job to another. They traipsed through the jungle and desert frontiers, finding easy work in the US-owned mines, railroads, oil fields, and plantations that were spreading out across the continent. At each new job, they waxed about the glories of the last, and at the end of the day, over beer and whiskey, they “persisted in digging the Canal again” in tales that grew taller with every retelling. Others first came to the Amazon to work on the Madeira–Mamoré railroad and then stayed on. Texas cowboy Jimmy James, for example, had been living in Belém when he befriended Reeves Blakeley and signed on to his work crew. Fordlandia also attracted a number of “American and European renegades” fleeing their pasts. The Frenchmen Yves Efira, who did Fordlandia’s clerical work and was considered a “splendid linguist,” was rumored to be an escapee from Devil’s Island, the prison island located just off French Guiana. Additionally, the plantation hired a number of veterans who for one reason or another had landed in Brazil after the war. One of them, a machinist named Sullivan, “never missed an opportunity” to talk about “Paris and the wonderful French girls.” But he didn’t get along with Mueller, an Austrian draftsman. Tensions between the two men