Fordlandia by Greg Grandin Read Free Book Online Page B

boiled over, and after one fight the machinist took the Austrian’s clothes and suitcases from the bunkhouse and threw them “outside in the mud from the torrential rain.” Mueller quit the plantation soon after. 12

    Most of these migrants were engineers and mechanics, bringing years of experience working in the jungle to the plantation. But it was hard to check credentials on the Tapajós, so a few professed to have talents that they didn’t. A Dane named Simonsen claimed to be a rubber expert and said that the best way to protect seedlings from insects was by rubbing Vaseline on their trunks. “He succeeded in getting rid of the insects, but the trees died too, so he was given a pink slip,” according to one personal account. 13
    By the time Fordlandia got fully under way, life for quite a few “tropical tramps” had turned desperate. In the 1910s and 1920s, they had “boomed from job to job,” ever ready to quit one because they knew they could always “find work at the end of the trail.” But after 1929, Europeans and Americans were likely to arrive at the mines, plantations, and railroads less boisterous and more hungry, searching not for adventure but for steady work no longer available in their home countries. Increasingly during the Great Depression, they found work sites to be unaccepting of the indulgences and pleasures associated with the drifting life of skilled itinerants. Mining and plantation companies had learned the importance of hiring married men, beholden to women and children, as a way to maintain a stable and responsible labor force. Corporate-run company towns grew “more and more respectable, more and more conscious of the ugliness of sin,” as a travel writer who passed through the region put it.

    Fordlandia’s puritanism was especially hard on Jack Diamond. Like Jimmy James, Diamond first arrived in Brazil to build the Madeira–Mamoré railroad, before moving on to other large infrastructure projects, eventually drifting over the Andes to take a job in Chile’s copper mines. With the onset of the Depression, though, Diamond found himself out of work and stranded. Bumming his way back to the Amazon, he hoped to get work again on the Madeira–Mamoré line, only to find it “virtually dead,” practically killed, first by the collapse of rubber prices and then by the global recession. After all the human lives wasted to build it, it was by 1930 running only one train each way every two weeks. He traveled down the Madeira River to Manaus. There, a group of expatriates raised a collection to stake him a ticket to Fordlandia, since “Henry Ford had a reputation of never refusing work to any man who came to his rubber plantation in search of it.” But Diamond couldn’t reconcile himself to Ford’s “new morality,” including his attempt to ban drinking and smoking. The shock was not of physical withdrawal: everybody from the head manager to common laborers got around Ford’s prohibition, and Diamond could always find a drink on what the skilled workers called rum row—the boats, barges, and canoes that served as floating bars and gambling houses bobbing just off the plantation’s shore—or on the Island of Innocents. It was rather, as one of his contemporaries put it, that Fordlandia’s strictures forced on him the realization that he had “outlived his day,” that “time had passed him by and that there was no longer a place for him in this world.” 14
    So he quit the plantation and boarded a cattle steamer back to Manaus. As the ship slowed to approach the city’s dock, Diamond looked down from its upper deck into its brown waters and saw his way out. He climbed over the railing and leaped into a congregation of crocodiles.

    SET EVEN FARTHER back from the river were the “modern wooden houses” that Oxholm had built for the American staff, with porches and sloping front yards, on a wide street lined with mango trees, sidewalks, and streetlamps. These residences sat